Our mission

Why Chatalot exists

My entire life, I have put security and privacy at the forefront of everything I do online. In this day and age, those things are taken for granted. We hand over our conversations, our photos, our private moments to corporations who treat them as assets to be mined, sold, and surveilled. Most people don't think twice about it — until something goes wrong.

I do think twice. And I decided to do something about it.

Chatalot exists because the alternatives failed us. Every major chat platform on the market is corporate-owned. Your data sits on their servers, governed by their terms, subject to their business decisions. They can sell, get acquired, change policies overnight, or hand everything over to the highest bidder. You are not the customer — you are the product.

I created Chatalot for me, myself, and I. I needed a platform where my conversations are truly mine. Where no corporation can read my messages, monetize my data, or decide what I'm allowed to say in private. If you share that need, I invite you to use my software.

This is a pet project — and that's the point

Like the creator of VLC, Chatalot is a passion project. It's not a startup chasing venture capital. It's not a product with quarterly revenue targets. There is no board of directors, no investors, no acqui-hire exit strategy. There's just the maintainer, building something believed in.

That means:

• No corporate overlord. Nobody can buy Chatalot and gut it for parts. Nobody can pivot it into an ad platform. Nobody can shut it down because it's not profitable enough.
• No ties to governments or shady organizations. This project is independent. It serves its users, not a political agenda.
• No paywalled features. The full feature set is available to everyone. Optional subscriptions may come one day to keep the project sustainable, but free users will never be second-class citizens. You won't lose features, hit artificial limits, or see "upgrade to unlock" prompts. If you pay, it's because you want to support the project — not because you're forced to.
• No telemetry, no analytics, no tracking. The maintainer doesn't know who you are, doesn't know what you say, and doesn't care. That's the whole point.

A long-term commitment

Chatalot is here for the long haul. This isn't a weekend hackathon project that gets abandoned in six months. Iteration, development, and improvement continue for years to come.

There are many features planned. The roadmap is deep. Every release makes the platform more capable, more polished, and more worthy of your trust. This isn't just being maintained — it's being actively built, every day.

Your privacy is not our business

The maintainer doesn't care what you do online. What you store, what you share, or who you talk to. It has never been the maintainer's business, and it never will be.

That's not a slogan — it's architecture. Chatalot is built so that the server can't read your messages even if it wanted to:

• End-to-end encryption on every message. The server stores ciphertext — random bytes that mean nothing without your keys.
• Your keys never leave your device. They're generated locally, stored locally, and used locally.
• The server is an untrusted relay. It routes messages but is architecturally separated from plaintext content.
• Your password is never stored. It's hashed with Argon2id — one of the strongest password hashing algorithms available. Nobody can recover it.
• Zero telemetry. No analytics scripts, no usage tracking, no crash reporting, no phone-home behavior.

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