Ostrich — grant programme
Ostrich gives companies a licence for Minimal Core, $100K to $300K each, sized to need. That is roughly 100M to 300M requests served by Minimal in a year, on your own hardware, at no charge.
We are built on things other people gave away. Somebody else’s operating system, somebody else’s database, somebody else’s compiler, somebody else’s answer at two in the morning to a question they had no reason to answer. Ostrich is us putting something back on the stack.
01
Each year we reserve $30M of Minimal Core licences. Each grant is $100K to $300K, set by the size of your need. At $1 per 1,000 requests, that is roughly 100M to 300M requests served by Minimal in a year.
We issue the $100K licence by default and scale it further, automatically, as your usage needs grow. Nothing is charged at the end of the year. There is no card on file, and no clause turns the gift into a bill.
02
One product: Minimal Core, the data access layer over a database you already run. It serves every table as REST and as MCP tools, permissioned per identity, from a binary on machines you control. Core is in beta.
The licence is for Minimal Core, nothing more.
03
Ostrich is reserved for companies: partnership firms, LLPs, private limited companies. A company applies with its registration details.
Sparrow is for students, companies with two founders and stealth startups. Pelican is for non-profit organisations. One application covers all three programmes, and what you are decides which one you are offered.
04
$30M at $100K each is 300 accepted applications a year. If most licences grow past $100K, the additional grant is on the house and the 300 stand. Applications past 300 go to a waitlist, and the waitlist is the first place we look when we find room.
From time to time we do find room, and release more licences than we planned. We will not quietly close a round and leave you refreshing a page to find out.
05
None of our SaaS stack is part of the programme or the licence: Agent Studio, App Studio, Chat Studio, Ask Studio and API Bay are each priced on their own. Support is best-effort, through the same channels everyone else uses.
06
Whoever holds a grant under the programme does not build a product that competes with Littlebit Labs for the next 7 years.
07
We take no equity, no revenue share, nothing from you. Besides the non-compete above, we ask one thing: tell us what you think of the product every quarter.
Build what you came to build.