Serverless · End-to-end encrypted · Windows & browser

Your community, encrypted end to end.
Held in freehold.

Every message, call, and screen share is encrypted and lives only on your members' own devices. It connects peer-to-peer, so no company sits in the middle to read your community, sell it, or pull the plug. No servers to rent. Your account holds only encrypted data — and vouches for your key, so abuse has a name behind it.

v0.8.0 · installer or portable zip · installs for you only, no admin rights · updates arrive over the swarm · or open it in your browser


The deed

Three clauses, cryptographically kept

Nobody can read it

Every message, call, file, and whiteboard stroke is end-to-end encrypted with keys that live inside the invite. Even the always-on keeper nodes that store history for quiet holds hold only ciphertext, provably.

An account that cannot read you

Holds replicate directly between members over an encrypted, hole-punched swarm. Your identity is a keypair on your device, and names, roles, and moderation are all signed with it. Your account — a username, a verified email, a password — stores only an encrypted copy of that key and signs a short-lived vouch for it. Communities can require the vouch, so a suspended account goes quiet everywhere; the server still never sees a message. No profile to mine, no telemetry to collect.

Yours to keep

Export any hold's history to JSON. Back up your whole account — identity, profile, every community — to one passphrase-encrypted file and restore it on a new machine. If an invite leaks, rotate it and re-key the entire hold.


What's inside

Everything a community needs, sealed end to end

Text

Channels, threads, and forums

Channels, categories, threads, forums with tags, reactions and animated emoji, pins, polls that close themselves, search with filters, slowmode, spoilers, link previews, and a translated UI (EN·ES·DE·FR).

Voice

Calls without call servers

Named lounges and moderator-only stages, screen and camera share, push-to-talk, per-user volume, DM calls that ring, voice and video messages — opus over the same encrypted swarm.

Private channels

Sealed to an access list

A channel can be locked to the members you choose: its contents are encrypted to their keys, and nobody else's client can read a word. We'll say the honest part too — everyone still replicates the hold, so outsiders keep the unreadable traffic and can see the channel exists. It hides what is said, not that it happened.

Moderation

Signed, not promised

Roles and permissions, timeouts, server mutes, bans with reasons and unbans, word filters, audit logs. Every action is a signed entry enforced by every member's own device — a modified client can't cheat it.

Workspace

More than chat

A shared whiteboard, a wiki, a kanban board, scheduled events with RSVPs, a files library, and hold stats — replicated, offline-capable, and attributable, because they're built from the same signed log as messages.

Identity

Recovery without a company

One encrypted backup file migrates your entire account to a new device — and because there's no password-reset desk, the app nudges you to make one. Friends, notes, and bookmarks stay yours alone.

Always on

Keepers and offline-first

Messages written offline deliver when a peer appears — append-only logs never lose words. Optional keeper nodes serve history while everyone sleeps, without the ability to read any of it.


How it holds

Built on ground that can't be repossessed

Append-only, signed logs

Each member writes to their own cryptographic log (Hypercore). Everything — messages, votes, strokes, bans — is an entry, replicated and verified by everyone. History can't be silently rewritten.

The invite is the key

A hold's invite encodes its encryption key. Share it privately and someone's in; rotate it and even old members with stale invites are locked out of the new epoch.

Direct connections, relay optional

Peers find each other through a distributed hash table and connect directly through home routers, so no outage page ever goes up. Prefer to hide your address? Route through a relay: it sees your address and your encrypted bytes, never a word.

Updates over the swarm

The app updates itself the same way your messages travel: peer-to-peer from the maintainer's signed release, verified before it applies. Install once, stay current.


Take possession

Two ways in

Portable zip

Simplest — no installer, no dependencies

  1. Download the zip and extract it anywhere (or use the installer)
  2. Run Freehold.exe
  3. Create a hold, or paste an invite a friend gave you

Windows will show a SmartScreen prompt the first time (the build isn't code-signed yet) — choose More info → Run anyway. If peers never connect, allow bare.exe in Windows Firewall.

Fully peer-to-peer

No download page at all — install over the swarm

# with Node.js installed npm i -g pear pear install pear://a9g7ca39zwtapuh3mjznkn5x1pg3xysu1he86gbesnuorf5q1o1o

Works while a seeder is online. Installed apps update over the air from the same link whenever a newer version is staged.


What's free, what's paid

The app is free. The land is yours. Forever.

Freehold

Free, forever

  1. Every feature, every hold, no limits
  2. Self-host keepers with the bundled keeper.js
  3. No ads, no telemetry — structurally impossible, not just promised

Hosted Keeper

~$5 / month per hold · coming soon

  1. An always-on node keeps your hold's history available while everyone sleeps
  2. Provably blind — keepers store ciphertext and never hold the key
  3. Paste your hold's keeper invite, done

Patron Pass

$25 · coming soon

  1. A 💎 badge beside your name in every hold, cryptographically signed — no client can fake it
  2. Never gates a feature; it funds the work
  3. Redeem in-app: Profile → 💎 Redeem patron key