Hello everyone!

Spokes (https://spokes.sh) is developed as a one-person operation. Last year I became a father and, more generally, children have been appearing in my friend group at an alarming rate.

Our group consists of 6 high school friends and our significant others. We’ve used Discord for years, but we all felt uneasy about uploading pictures of our kids to Discord, Messenger, or other cloud platforms. We wanted a private place where we could share family pictures, organize events, chat with our loved ones, and, when the kids grow up, have a safe place for them to hang out online.

Our requirements were nothing fancy, but after trying many of the existing self-hosted options, we couldn't find the right fit. We had settled on Matrix/Element, the tech is great, but the apps feel clunky and it doesn’t really feel like an organized Discord server.

So I decided to try and build my own. It sounded like a fun challenge, and as I worked on the project, I realized my approach was different enough to maybe be interesting to others.

Spokes is guided by 3 simple design goals :

1. Absolute Privacy :

All data stays on your server. Any data that must transit through external services (like mobile push notifications) is encrypted in transit.

2. Frictionless Experience :

Spokes aims to be as easy to use as possible for your friends and family. With free native iOS and Android apps, reliable push notifications, organized text and voice/video channels with built-in noise cancellation, native GIF support, shared photo albums, group calendar and more, Spokes' goal is to "just work".

3. Easy to Self-Host :

Deploying and maintaining Spokes should be as painless as possible for the server admin. Everything runs inside a single Docker container with no external database required.

Try it out :

Live Demo: https://demo.spokes.sh

Website: https://spokes.sh

iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spokes/id6763387907

Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pcbee.spokes

Business model :

I did my best to align the business model with the design goals. Spokes Server is source-available and is free to self-host forever with unlimited users, unlimited channels, and free web/PWA push notifications.

Every new server comes with a 2-month free trial of native mobile push notifications (no credit card required). After that, an optional Spokes Pass ($45/year per server) unlocks the mobile push notification relay for your entire server and directly funds continued development. Licenses are strictly per-server. There are no per-user fees and never will be.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below and I’ll do my best to answer!