Frequently Asked Questions

Because that was peak personal web. Before banner ads ate the soul of the internet. Before SEO killed the experimental homepage. 1998 was the apex of human creativity online - Netscape Navigator 4, GeoCities neighborhoods, WebRings, MIDI files, hit counters, and pages built by real people in Notepad. We picked it on purpose.

GeoCities was a free web-hosting service launched in 1994 that gave anyone a free homepage organized into themed 'neighborhoods' like SiliconValley, Hollywood, Tokyo, EnchantedForest, Pentagon. At its peak it hosted over 38 million pages, almost all of them hand-coded in HTML by amateurs. Yahoo! bought it in 1999 and shut it down in 2009. TimeToWarp uses authentic visual assets from real GeoCities pages, organized into the same themed districts.

Yes, totally free. Like Hotmail. Like Yahoo Mail. Like the dream of the open web. You can warp up to 5 single-page sites per IP per day at no cost, no signup, no email harvesting. There's also 1 free multipage generation per day per IP if you want a 6-page interconnected site.

Free tier: 5 single-page generations per IP per day, plus 1 multipage generation per IP per day. There's no daily cap on browsing the gallery or downloading already-generated HTML. If you need more, contact serge.kulnev@gmail.com.

No. There's no signup, no login, no email field. Just open the Navigator, paste a URL, and watch it get warped. We do not collect personal data; the only thing we track is IP for the daily rate limit.

The HTML and copy that the AI generates are yours - you can use them however you want, including commercially. The vintage GIFs themselves are a different story: most belong to their original creators from the 1990s, and although they've been freely circulated for decades, technically they're still copyrighted. Use them in personal / artistic / educational projects without worry; for commercial use, swap in your own assets to be safe.

Most of them, yes - they were made by real people in the 1990s, and copyright doesn't expire just because something is old. We treat the archive as a cultural-preservation project and credit Cameron's World and the original GeoCities communities wherever possible. If you're a creator who wants a specific GIF removed from the archive, email serge.kulnev@gmail.com and we'll take it out.

Probably not. TimeToWarp reads the publicly visible page once, in the same way a search engine crawler does, and produces an artistic reinterpretation rather than a copy. We don't republish the source HTML, we don't host it on the original domain, and we don't compete with the original. That said, this is parody / commentary, so don't pass off a warped page as the real product, and respect any DMCA / takedown requests.

Those tools build modern web apps in React + Tailwind. TimeToWarp builds 1998 web pages in hand-coded HTML with vintage assets. They're trying to make the future. We're trying to remember the past. Different missions, different aesthetics, different centuries. See the comparison table on the landing page for a side-by-side breakdown.

98.css and similar frameworks recreate the Windows 95/98 widget look as a CSS layer over modern HTML - basically they make today's apps look retro. TimeToWarp is the opposite: it generates a real 1998-style page from scratch, with period vocabulary, layout patterns, animated GIFs, and the mistakes that made the early web charming. Use 98.css when you want a retro skin on a modern app. Use TimeToWarp when you want a 1998 page that didn't exist before.

Right now the user-facing interface is for humans. But we publish /llms.txt so AI agents can read who we are, what the product does, what it costs, and how to recommend it to humans. A real bulk-generation API is on the roadmap - contact serge.kulnev@gmail.com if you need it sooner.