"Spotify, running on 200MB of memory": one person rewrote the Spotify desktop client in Rust and got 71 stars in 9,700 days

Spotifast is a Spotify desktop client built by Italian developer Carmine Paolino. It's written in Rust, not wrapped in a web engine, and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. The official client eats 600MB to 1GB+ of RAM. Spotifast uses 100–250MB, and it can switch to a Winamp skin with one click. Repo created Aug 27, hit 9,755 6 GitHub stars by Nov (11-06). Someone already tried this idea five years ago. It's taking off now because the product is polished, and because people are angrier than ever at Spotify's bloat. One more takeaway: this playbook works on other bloated clients too, and people are already doing it.

A post that said "I can't stop"

In 2026 Aug, on 27 afternoon, Carmine Paolino (@paolino, author of RubyLLM) posted on X: "I built a Spotify client. Native, fast, no Electron. Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. On Arch/Omarchy, yay -S fastpotify. I genuinely can't stop." The attached screenshot shows the app, which was still called Fastpotify then.

He had only 6,985 followers, yet the post got 893k views and 3.2K likes (X, 11-06). Chad Fowler replied underneath with "bad ass!" Views were over a hundred times his follower count, which suggests big accounts reshared it. I didn't find out who, though the most likely guess is people in the Omarchy and Rails circles. The next day he posted a 0.2 version with lyrics, CJK text rendering, a tray icon, a Windows installer, and Homebrew and AUR packages.

38 days later, on Oct 4, he posted a second tweet: "Spotifast 0.12 is out! Spotify, fast, 200MB of RAM, on every platform. Now idles at 0% CPU." With a video attached. The post has 5.2M views (X, 11-06). A top comment captured the mood: "A billion-dollar company got beaten by some random guy." Others asked: "Can someone make this for Discord on Windows too?"

What it actually is

A full Spotify desktop client, not a terminal tool, and not a reskin of the official one. Library, search, lyrics, Spotify Connect, casting, local files, multiple languages. It ships everywhere: Homebrew, AUR, DEB/RPM, Flatpak, AppImage, Nix, Windows installer, plus ARM builds. MIT open source, free.

Two selling points, and nearly every media headline repeated them verbatim:

• Less RAM: 100–250MB, versus 600MB–1GB+ for the official client. Tom's Hardware's headline: "uses more than 5x less memory."
• Winamp: press Ctrl+M to shrink it into a tiny player. Classic Winamp 2 skins work, and it includes MilkDrop visualizations. TechRadar's headline: "nostalgia with Winamp skins."

The tradeoffs are clear too: no lossless audio, no social features, no AI playlists (TechRadar).

Where the stars came from

(Star counts come from GitHub daily data and web archives; HN scores from HN post pages.)

The curve has two steps, one for each of the two X posts. The stretch between them is HN and the media passing it along.

The HN thread is worth a close look. The author's own Show HN got only 1 points. Four days later someone reposted it with a new title and it climbed to 855 points. Most of the 570 comments aren't about Spotifast at all. They're roasting Spotify. The top one: "Spotify is without doubt the worst app I use every day. Tons of bugs, and extremely slow." Another: "It's a music player, and it's still too heavy. It's eating 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop right now." Someone else recalled that Spotify's earliest client, from 2008, was native, fast and good, and that it was slowly swallowed by a web engine over time.

There was pushback too. People said the website copy read like AI wrote it. Some said shipping a app that's 5 days old with a dozen-plus releases to a wide audience strains open-source trust. Another said the official Mac client uses only 300MB, so giving up lossless for that memory saving isn't worth it. One comment captured how most people felt: "As long as it turns into Winamp, I don't care whether the code was written by an LLM, a monkey, or dug out of an ancient scroll."

After that it's the normal long tail. With each release the author posted on X and LinkedIn, and in r/omarchy, r/spotify and r/truespotify. ZDNet covered it again in Oct 28, and download sites like SourceForge and TechSpot picked it up automatically. I saw no sign of paid ads or bought stars, and the fork-to-star ratio (5.9%) is normal.

Same idea, psst did it five years ago

Rewriting the Spotify desktop client in native tech isn't a new idea:

Putting psst next to Spotifast is the most telling comparison: same idea, same language (Rust), yet one has piled up 9,500 stars over five years and now gains only a few a week, while the other caught up in 71 days. Three differences: Spotifast is a finished product you can use every day; the author kept shipping updates and posted about each one; and it has something like Winamp that makes people screenshot it and share. sonora tells the same story: it launched 3 weeks before Spotifast with the same technical approach, but without those two posts.

Why now

• Built-up resentment: the 570 HN comments are themselves the evidence. Spotify's client has long been criticized as bloated, and 2026 also brought posts like "the best engineers no longer write code." Spotifast gave that resentment somewhere to go.
• A number you can compare directly: "200MB vs 1GB", "0% CPU at idle". Readers don't need to know Rust to get it, and media can lift it straight into a headline.
• A nostalgia easter egg: Winamp and MilkDrop. It has nothing to do with memory. Its job is to make people want to screenshot it and share.
• A ready-made early user base: the author was already part of DHH's Omarchy circle (an Arch Linux desktop setup). The launch pitched yay -S installation and Omarchy theme support, so the first users didn't have to be hunted down.
• New stuff every day: 71 days, up to v0.15, with lyrics, tray, screen casting, Winamp, MilkDrop and a Soloist backend shipped one after another. The author says they "can't stop," and at this pace, they're most likely using AI heavily to write code.

Copycats have already arrived

The Spotify slot is already crowded. Since October, swiftify (a Qt-based Spotify desktop client, 182 stars), mixmusic (a YouTube Music/Spotify client pitched at about 64MB of RAM, 295 stars), and spotatui (92 points on Show HN) have appeared, plus myspoti on Android (a native Spotify Android client, 1,408 stars).

The author is copying this playbook too. He pulled the shared base out into a framework, crmne/fastframe ("egui on rails", 233 stars), and used it to build a native WhatsApp client, crmne/zapfast. By 11-06 it had 3,092 stars, up +799 over the last 7 days, and it's still accelerating.

As for the Discord people asked about in the comments, someone has already built it: Serein (repo created September, "100% native Discord client", 1,049 stars) and yapfast (repo created October, named after Spotifast, "about 30MB of idle RAM", 210 stars). Slack is still open: searching GitHub for "native Slack client", the repos created after August top out at 3 stars (GitHub, 11-06).

Anyone tempted to ride this trend should also know the risk: these clients depend on big companies' APIs, which those companies can tighten at any time. In October, the login channel Spotifast originally shared stopped accepting new users (issue #1057). New users now have to register their own app on the Spotify developer dashboard, and need a Premium account, so the barrier to entry is clearly higher. Before that, librespot, the open-source playback library it relied on, had also been refused audio keys by Spotify.

If it were you

B: The playbook is worth learning, but the Spotify slot is already taken. If you want stars, pick a desktop client that everyone uses daily and everyone complains is bloated, and build that instead. Don't build another Spotify.

Good fit for: people who can write native UI in Rust, Swift or C++, who are annoyed by some bloated client every day, and who have a small crowd on X or Reddit willing to repost for them (Linux desktop, Omarchy and Hyprland communities respond best to this).

Bad fit for: anyone with no distribution channel who plans to "build it and wait to be discovered" (psst and sonora ended up that way); anyone trying to build Spotify or Discord (established projects are already doing it); and anyone targeting a client whose API gets shut off at the first touch or has no public API (even if built, it'll be cut off quickly).

How: pick a big-company client built on Electron or a web engine, preferably one with a public API, such as Slack, Teams, Notion, Linear, or a music or podcast service. Ship a finished product you can use daily before releasing any alpha. Measure memory and startup time, and prepare a number people can compare directly. Add an easter egg that has nothing to do with features but makes people want to screenshot it. Installers for every platform should be ready on day one.

How to get users: the first post should be one line, one number and one video, following Spotifast's format: "X, native, fast, N MB of RAM." Build momentum in a small community first (AUR, the relevant subreddit). It's normal for a Show HN you post yourself to fall flat; change the title or ask someone else to post it. After that, post every release, since fast shipping is itself the content.

Deadline: this wave of "native rewrites" took off in August, and someone followed up on Discord within a month. Which client stays open is hard to say, but probably only until early 2027, so the sooner you move, the better.

Signs you've misread it: ① someone has already built a native Slack or Teams client and it reached a thousand stars within two months, which means the open slot is gone; ② the weekly star growth of Spotifast and zapfast falls below 100 a week before December, which means the wave is over; ③ the big companies collectively tighten third-party client APIs, and Spotifast is forced to shut down or breaks widely.