Bear Blog

Herman Martinus launched Bear Blog from South Africa in 2020 as a reaction to everything modern blogging had become: slow, JavaScript-heavy, surveillance-tracked, SEO-optimized. Bear Blog stripped everything away — just text, a tiny amount of HTML, and nothing else. Pages load in under 1 second because there's nothing to load. No JavaScript by default. No tracking. No fancy editor. Write in a minimal text box, hit publish. Herman launched to immediate praise from the web performance and IndieWeb communities, who had been waiting for exactly this. Bear Blog went viral multiple times on Hacker News. He charged $9/year for a custom domain and extra features. Revenue grew to thousands of dollars per month from a community of writers, developers, and journalists who valued speed and simplicity above all else. Herman wrote openly about building Bear Blog in public, sharing subscriber counts and revenue. A solo developer's personal project turned into one of the best-loved minimal blogging platforms on the internet.