Introducing LemonSpace

LemonSpace — a (self-hosted if you want) source-available AI creative canvas for small design and marketing teams.

What is it supposed to do? You upload your brand or campaign assets, you can edit them in a non destructive, node-based workflow (like you maybe know from other creative tools like Blender or Nuke), creative versions of them and let specialised agents help you with your campaign goal.

Why self-hosted and source-available?

Freepik Spaces showed me this kind of canvas actually works for creative teams. But it's a black box: proprietary SaaS, their pricing, your assets on their servers. I wanted a version where teams can own their stack — data stays local, models are swappable, you use providers with zero data retention, and the code is auditable. BSL 1.1 license, transitions to Apache 2.0 after 3 years.

Target: 2–10 person design or marketing teams who care about data sovereignty and are comfortable running their own infra. Hosted plans will be available for the convenience.

Tech stack:

- Next.js 16 (App Router) + Tailwind v4 + ShadCN

- Convex (self-hosted) -- real-time sync, file storage, background jobs in one

- Better Auth -- self-hosted auth, Magic Link via Polar plugin

- @xyflow/react -- the canvas

- OpenRouter -- AI layer (image gen + text/reasoning, 9 models)

- Freepik -- Stock Asset Provider (via API), as well as video generation with modern tools

- Polar.sh -- subscriptions + top-ups, Merchant of Record (though the AI image creation may be a bit of a road block)

- Coolify -- deploys everything on a German server so it's GPDR compliant

- Cloudflare -- DNS, CDN, DDoS, and a Tunnel for local HTTPS dev

- Redis (self hosted) + Sentry + Rybbit (self-hosted analytics)

Why Convex specifically? It gives me real-time sync, file storage, and background jobs without stitching together WebSockets, S3, and a queue. Conscious vendor lock-in — I'm aware of the tradeoff. But then again, everyone and their mother uses Supabase, so there's that.

The project is coming along pretty good - the image editing pipeline is nearly done, you can already create versions of your image and video assets via AI providers, stock assets, and the first agents are on the way .

Solo founder, based in Germany. Building in public from here. The domain is Lemonspace.io - though the Landing Page is still very much work in progress ^^

So... yeah, that's my little side project. Feel free to comment :)