How this is built
A whole world, for the weight of one photo.
The city you just flew through weighs less than a photo from your phone. The median website, with no 3D at all, weighs eighteen times more. Here is why that matters, and how to check it yourself in one minute.
Why now
Something changed recently. Software that behaves intelligently used to be rare. Now it is in everything, and almost all of it works the same way: your words leave your device, travel to a building full of machines, and an answer comes back.
That building is real. It draws power, it needs cooling, and it runs whether or not the thing you asked for was hard. We have quietly decided that ordinary tasks should cost a round trip to an industrial site.
This page is a small argument that they should not. Not every one, and not always, but far more often than we currently assume.
Why should you care?
Every megabyte a website sends has to travel. It runs on electricity, in warehouses full of machines, every single time anyone visits.
The web keeps getting heavier. The things it does have not obviously got better. Somewhere along the way, waste stopped being embarrassing.
Light sites are not just greener. They open on old phones. They work on bad connections. They cost less to visit if you pay for data. That used to be normal.
Check it yourself. One minute.
- Press F12, click Network, tick Disable Cache.
- Press Ctrl+R.
- Read the bar at the bottom. The second number is what actually crossed the network. Ours says about 143 kB.
Now do the same on any other site. A news homepage, a shop, a search results page. Almost all of them are measured in megabytes.
The comparison we find most telling: there is an annual competition where developers compete to build games in 13 kilobytes of code. Even those entries usually arrive as two to five hundred kilobytes once fonts and sound are counted, and some pass a megabyte. This page renders a procedurally generated city with traffic, weather on the rooftops and a soundtrack, and still arrives lighter than most of them.
If you reload before opening the panel, the list will be empty. It only records while it is watching.
Nothing here is watching you
No analytics. No advertising. No tracking pixel. Look at the list of addresses in that same panel: they all point here.
You may spot one row struck out in red. That is our own hosting company trying to slip in an analytics script, and your browser refusing, because we told it to. We did not ask you to trust us. We made it impossible.
Where are the pictures?
There are none. Click the Images filter and you will find two tiny icons.
The city, its windows, its traffic, the wear on its rooftops: all of it is written as a short mathematical description your graphics chip follows to draw the scene fresh, sixty times a second. There is no photograph of a city here, because there is no city to photograph.
The app works the same way
Most software that seems clever sends your words to a data centre. A very large model spends a lot of energy producing an answer. Your private thoughts become a line in someone else's logs.
Budge does its thinking on your phone, using a design built for one job instead of every job. No cloud. No account. It works with the signal off.
Cheaper. Greener. Private, because nothing leaves. Reliable, because nothing can go down. This site is that same argument, made where you can see it.
How we keep it true
Claims rot. Code changes, someone optimises the wrong thing, and a year later the promise is quietly false.
73 automatic checks run before anything here is published, holding 894 separate promises about this site. If any one of them fails, the release stops. Not a warning: it simply does not ship.
Each check is also tested by deliberately breaking the thing it protects, to confirm it complains. A check that has never caught a real failure is decoration, and we do not count it.
A recent example, because the number matters more than the claim: this page once said 107 KB. A check measured the real transfer at 143 and refused to publish until the page was corrected. The page you are reading lost that argument, which is the point of having it.
Measured on the build you are looking at. About 21 kB of our 143 is unavoidable request overhead, The compression gap is now closed: we serve the maximum-quality versions we prepare at build time rather than letting the host recompress on the fly. HTTP Archive publishes what an average page weighs.