Square Town (square.pov.town) is live as of August 2026. It's a favicon wall: paste a URL, Square Town fetches your favicon, you click an empty cell, add an email address, and that 1×1 square is yours — free, no card, forever*, unless someone pays to evict you: double what you paid, $1 minimum. There are no accounts, no uploads, no sizes and no subscriptions. The wall is 3D, updates live in every open browser, and has rules that make it a game rather than a JPEG: a $100 Throne, evictions at 2× (from $1), free public kisses, a Hall of Clowns, and rings that unlock at 75 % full.
TL;DR — 1 square = free. Pick your spot. Evict anyone for double what they paid, $1 minimum. The Throne in the dead centre is $100 and doubles on every eviction. Anyone can kiss any icon, free — kisses are public, counted, and grow its tower. No favicon = 🤡. Only the central 16×16 is live at launch; it grows by 4 in every direction each time it's 75 % full, up to 1024×1024. Everything is pushed to every open browser over WebSockets. Made by one indie developer, runs on Cloudflare's free tier, launched August 2026. Rulebook: how it works.
What it is
A shared grid, 1024×1024 at full size, where each cell shows one website's favicon and links to it. You don't design anything: Square Town asks Google's favicon service for your icon and draws it on the cell you chose. Top-down it looks like the classic 2005 pixel wall, minus the mush — favicons are already drawn to be legible at 16 pixels, so the wall reads as a wall of brands, not TV static.
Ctrl+drag (two-finger drag on touch) tilts it into 3D. Every favicon becomes a tower whose height is its clicks plus kisses, tinted with the icon's dominant colour. Empty cells have trees and lakes. A sun follows your local time of day and casts shadows; birds and the occasional hot-air balloon cross overhead. It is, deliberately, more place than billboard.
Why it exists
Three reasons, in the order they occurred to the person who built it.
An indie dev with too many projects. The author has a pile of side projects and no marketing budget for any of them. What they wanted was somewhere to put all of them, cheaply, side by side, with a number attached — clicks, views — so they'd know which ones strangers actually touch. Free per domain and no design work is that. See Square Town for developers with many side projects.
Million Dollar Homepage nostalgia. The 2005 original sold a million pixels at $1 each, sold out in five months, and has been frozen ever since — roughly 40 % of its links are dead as of August 2026. It was a great stunt and a bad place: nothing to do after you'd bought, nobody to prune it (see the dead-link problem). Square Town takes the "$1 and it's yours" joke one step further — free and it's yours, $1 and it's someone else's — and fixes the second half. Long version: the Million Dollar Homepage, 21 years later.
The wall should be a game, not a JPEG. Every clone copied the grid and none of them gave you a reason to come back. So Square Town has rules with teeth: your square can be taken, the centre has a price tag that grows, and the map itself grows when it fills. Reasons to open the tab tomorrow.
The rules, briefly
| Rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| 1 square = free | Every square is 1×1, $0, no card. Click an empty cell, paste a URL and an email address, claim. No accounts. |
| The Throne 👑 | The 4×4 dead centre. $100 to start, one owner, gold tile with a crown. Evicting the owner costs double the last price, every time ($100 → $200 → $400 …). The ring around it (its aura) is unbuildable. |
| Evictions 💀 | Take any square by paying double what its owner paid, $1 minimum — so a free square is $1 to take. Card via Stripe. They're deposed in the live feed. The next evictor pays double your price. |
| Kiss the icon 💋 | Anyone can kiss any icon, free, by clicking it and pressing 💋. Kisses are public and counted, and each one adds a storey to the icon's tower. |
| Hall of Clowns 🤡 | No favicon = a clown emoji on your square and a spot on the public list, until you add one and hit "I fixed my favicon". |
| Ring unlocking 🔓 | Only the central 16×16 is live at launch. At 75 % full it grows by 4 in every direction (16 → 24 → 32 …), up to 1024×1024 = 1,048,576 squares. Locked area is never shown. |
| Deeds 📜 | A secret deed URL is your only proof of ownership — no login, no reset; it can be mailed to the address you gave, which is also where an eviction warning goes if you ask for one. The deed shows views, clicks and kisses; $5 one-time unlocks per-day analytics. |
| Live ⚡ | Every claim, eviction, kiss and unlock is pushed to every open browser over WebSockets. |
That's the whole rulebook. It's short because the site is simple and petty. Prices are on the pricing page, which is also short.
What's different from the other 434 walls
We went and looked. As of 18 August 2026, our landscape survey counts 434 pixel walls, logo boards and pay-to-rank lists — 221 active, 160 dead, the rest dormant or sold out. The graveyard is the story: clones that copy the grid but give no reason to return tend to die within a year, and the "$1 forever" price point alone is now crowded with 2026 entrants — which is partly why Square Town's squares are free and its dollar is the eviction floor. Full write-up: pixel wall graveyard: why clones die.
Some of them have shipped a piece of Square Town's loop, and credit where due — the closest, as of August 2026: Milliboard is a pay-to-rank leaderboard with a daily throne, but it's a list, not a map. earth.tattoo has doubling outbids ($1 → $2 → $4 → $8) on a real-Earth globe, in pixel art, crypto only. Tocka has live takeover on a painted canvas, each takeover raising that pixel's price by 1¢. The Forever Wall ($1 = 1 pixel), Link for a Dollar and Million Squares Project ($1 per square) sell permanent spots, no game loop. 9Mpixels (now dead) expired free pixels after 24 hours. Full comparisons live under Square Town vs. the other walls.
Nobody, in that survey, has favicon-from-URL (zero design work) plus free public kissing plus ring unlocking plus click-height towers plus live WebSockets on one free wall. Nobody does favicon squares at all; nobody gates growth on fill percentage; nobody lets anyone kiss anyone's icon. That combination is the bet.
What's under it
One Cloudflare Worker, a D1 SQLite database, one Durable Object holding the WebSockets, Stripe Checkout and a webhook, three.js vendored in the page. It runs on Cloudflare's free tier, which is the honest answer to "how is free forever?" — nothing needs renewing, so there's no hosting bill to lapse. The engineering post is how Square Town runs a live 3D wall on Cloudflare's free tier, and the whole wall is readable as JSON at /api/state.
What's next (honestly: nothing promised)
Square Town was built in a day and tuned since. There is no roadmap to sell you. What happens next is mostly up to the town: if squares get claimed, rings unlock and the wall grows; if the centre gets contested, the Throne prices itself. Constants like the 75 %, the 8-cell ring step and the $100 Throne are one line each in the source, so they can be tuned — but "we'll change the rules under you" is not a promise either. The only promise is the price: 1 square = free, forever*.
The asterisk is evictions. Read it before you claim something you can't bear to lose: what happens when you get evicted.
How to claim a square
- Open square.pov.town. It needs JavaScript and WebGL; the wall is a three.js scene.
- Hover an empty cell — it highlights. Click it. (Not the Throne, unless you have $100 and a personality. Undecided? How to pick a good square.)
- Paste your URL. Square Town previews the favicon it will use.
- Add an email address — no account, no password; it's where your deed link can be sent and where the warning goes. Press Claim. $0, no card, instant.
- Save the deed link you land on. It's the only proof you own the square. It's also remembered under "📜 My deeds" in that browser.
- Optional: kiss your own icon (💋) — each kiss adds a storey to your tower; buy $5 analytics on the deed page; tilt into 3D and watch it grow.
If you want to evict someone instead: click their favicon, press evict, pay double what they paid ($1 minimum) by card via Stripe. They'll find out in the feed.
FAQ
What is Square Town?
Square Town (square.pov.town) is a live, 3D favicon wall launched in August 2026. Each 1×1 square is free to claim, shows one website's favicon and links to it. Anyone can evict a square by paying double ($1 minimum); anyone can kiss any icon, free; the wall grows as it fills.
How much does it cost?
Nothing for a square — $0, no card. Evicting any square costs double what its owner paid, $1 minimum, by card via Stripe. The 4×4 Throne is $100 to start and doubles on every eviction. Optional per-day analytics on a deed are $5 one-time.
Is "forever" real?
There's no expiry and no hosting bill (Cloudflare free tier), so yes — with an asterisk: anyone can evict you by paying double.
Do I need an account?
No. There are no accounts. You give an email address when you claim (for the deed link and eviction warnings, not a login), and ownership is a secret deed URL. Lose it and it's gone; there's no password reset.
Does a square help my SEO?
No. Clicks go through a plain 302 redirect (/go/:id) and the wall is a WebGL canvas, so there is no link equity. What you get is visibility in town, a showcase, a game, and click/view/kiss counts.
How is Square Town different from the Million Dollar Homepage?
The original sold pixels once and froze; Square Town gives favicon squares away and keeps moving: evictions, a Throne, free public kisses, ring unlocks, live updates and a 3D view. Also a square is free here (and $1 to evict); the original's minimum block was $100.
How big is the wall?
1024×1024 = 1,048,576 squares at full size. Only the central 16×16 is live at launch; each time it's 75 % full it grows by 4 cells in every direction.