# Celld

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/celld/

14 people recommended Celld in Hacker News comments, 2 had mixed feelings and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 12 months, in 7 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open source Durable Objects runtime that stores each object as SQLite in an S3 bucket you own, so it runs outside Cloudflare. Caveat: needs S3 even for local prototyping.

Summary written by Claude from 24 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 21 of those comments still count.

## Why people recommend it

- Durable Objects outside a single provider (2 comments in the sample): "having durable objects outside Cloudflare and also self hosted ones means a lot" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49196095)) "There is a far less lock-in to CF than there once was." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49957469))
- Object storage for coordination and persistence (2 comments in the sample): "Bootstrapping both durability and coordination off object storage simplifies so many things for self-hosting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020609)) "celld has been working remarkably well, depending only on object storage for coordination and persistence." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50023277))
- Open alternative to Cloudflare Workers (2 comments in the sample): "a self-hosted version of Cloudflare Workers that actually doesn’t suck" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021640)) "will make an open source self host-able workers platform" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977056))
- Runs on ordinary VPS hosting (1 comment in the sample): "there's no reason this wouldn't run fine on most hosting, you definitely don't need bare metal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189393))

## What people warn about

- Consistency doubts about S3 coordination (2 comments in the sample): "the actual segment writes looked like plain, unconditional PUTs with no epoch check" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205618)) "that S3 _is_ the control plane and consensus layer, no?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189018))
- Project care and future doubted (2 comments in the sample): "LLM-isms like this on your home page make me less trusting in the care gone into the project." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49282971)) "killing off promising not-vendor-locked open source project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038506))

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Celld", https://hackerapproved.com/p/celld/ (14 recommend, 2 mixed, 5 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.