Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it.

There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.

That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.

Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.

We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.

Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.

Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.

What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"