Fold Commons

About

Fold Commons builds free, open browser tools for the AlphaFold era of structural biology — honest about confidence, free forever, nothing about you collected. iPad and Mac apps follow the web.

A note from the founder

Hi — I'm Nathan. I started Fold Commons because the single most useful thing in structural biology, the AlphaFold Database, is free and open, and the tools around it should be too. Every tool here opens as a web page you can use on any device without installing anything or making an account. That page is the product, not a preview of one.

The promise is yours, not ours: see any protein in seconds, coloured honestly by the model's own confidence, and get the next sixty seconds — compare, find a pocket, map a variant, share a link — without a paywall or a sign-up. iPad and Mac apps come second and add only what a browser can't do; nothing is held back from the web to make an app look better.

Web first, iPad and Mac second

Fold Commons builds for the web first. Every tool ships as a free page you can open on any device without installing anything — and that page is the product, not a preview of one. iPad and Mac apps come second: they wrap the same tools and add only what a browser cannot do (Files, the Share Sheet, an offline library, Spotlight). Nothing is held back from the web to make the app look better.

How we're funded

Non-profit; incorporation and fiscal sponsorship in progress. In progress via NumFOCUS or OMSF (OMSF is the best fit for molecular software). Donations are not open yet.

Our running costs are deliberately small: a domain name and Cloudflare hosting. Because the tools run entirely in your browser — your device talks directly to public databases like the AlphaFold DB, UniProt and the PDB — there are no servers to pay for and no per-use compute bill. Grants (OS4LS / Renaissance Philanthropy, OMSF, NumFOCUS, NSF POSE), foundation support, and individual donations once open. No ads, no paid tiers, no data brokerage.

How we work — governance, roadmap and status →

Your privacy

None currently. If added, it will be identifier-free (no cookies, no cross-site tracking) and documented in the privacy policy. We name our host and cover the website, the web tools, Junior and the native apps in the privacy policy and terms.

One thing about the name

Fold Commons is the non-profit at foldcommons.org; it is unrelated to the theFoldSF/foldCommons repository.

Contact