A fantasy ticker stuck in Chrome, rebuilt as a desktop app on three platforms.

Challenge

Phil and three partners had raised money around a clear idea: a fantasy sports ticker that sat at the edge of the screen while you watched a game. Daniel, a RelentNet co-founder, met them at an incubator pop-up where they were looking for a developer partner.

They had already paid for two builds. What they had to show for it was a Chrome extension that worked only in the browser and only during the season. Each round had left a different developer’s code behind, and none of it was in source control.

The team had the idea and the money. They did not have a foundation that could hold either.

Daniel read the code first and called it: this had to be a rebuild. Brandon took a second look for anything worth saving and reached the same answer. The Firebase setup was too tangled to extend, and every fix on top of it would be paying interest on the wrong foundation.

The bigger problem was scope. A ticker that lived in a browser and ran only during the season was a much smaller product than the one the founders wanted. The fix was to take it out of the browser, broaden it past sports, and build it so a new data source could be added without rebuilding the rest.

Solution

Scrollr became a native desktop app. The client is Tauri v2 around React 19, Vite 7, and TanStack Router, and it installs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. The ticker pins to the top or bottom of any monitor, with speed, density, and row count all adjustable.

Behind it, each source has its own Rust service that pulls on its own schedule: TwelveData WebSockets for markets, ESPN for scores, RSS for news, Yahoo for fantasy. They all write to PostgreSQL. Sequin watches the database for changes and hands them to a Go core API, which pushes each one to the right users over Redis pub/sub and Server-Sent Events. Self-hosted Logto handles sign-in.

The expensive decision was keeping every channel separate: its own service, its own API, its own tab and feed, and no code shared between them. It cost more up front. It is also why new channels ship today without touching the rest of the app, and why outside contributors can add their own.

Results

Scrollr is a public download today. The app is free on all three platforms with three widget slots, and a paid Uplink plan adds more. The live catalog lists 56 widgets across sports, news, finance, and utilities.

The code is public on GitHub under AGPL-3.0, and the community gathers on Discord. The founders, Phil included, have stayed close the whole way. This is the product they paid for twice before: a real app, not a brittle extension.

Scrollr is installed on machines across all three platforms, with a growing base of weekly active users and paying Uplink subscribers, and the user community gathers on Discord.

Stewardship

Two years in, the work is ongoing. RelentNet designs and builds new channels and features, hosts the production stack, and monitors and maintains the services.

Every release builds, deploys, and runs a smoke test through GitHub Actions. The download page is on version 1.6.10 as of October 2026.