Pricing & funding
How Keylane makes money
A privacy product that will not explain its business model is asking you to trust a company whose incentives you cannot see. Here is ours, including the parts that are unfinished.
The short version
Keylane is developed entirely with our own money. There is no venture capital behind it, no outside investors, no accelerator, no grant, and no advertising revenue. The public relay runs on servers we pay for out of our own pocket. The one kind of outside money we would take, and intend to apply for, is public-interest grants — the non-dilutive kind offered by EU internet programmes and internet-freedom funds, which pay for open-source work without acquiring a say in the product. If one is ever accepted, it will be named on this page.
The apps are free and the public network is free, and we intend to keep the public network free for as long as we can afford to. That is a statement about our intent and our bank account rather than a guarantee, and we would rather put it that way than promise something whose cost scales with every new user.
Money, when it arrives, comes from optional infrastructure that organizations choose to buy — dedicated servers, on-premises deployments, business features — and possibly from donations or a voluntary plan whose entire purpose is keeping the public relay free for everyone else. It has never come from advertising or from user data, and the funding structure is what makes that commitment credible rather than merely stated.
What is free
Free means free. Not a trial, not a limited tier designed to become annoying, and not free-because-you-are-the-product.
The apps
Android and iOS, with every feature. No paid tier withholds a security feature.
Messaging on the public network
Messaging and media on the relay we operate, with allowances generous enough that a person simply chatting never meets them.
All encryption
Post-quantum key exchange, metadata minimization, and every privacy control.
No account, no fine print
No signup, no identifier, no seat count. Allowances are fair-use and generous — and if one ever changes, it is announced in the changelog first, not edited in quietly.
Federation
Reach anyone on any Keylane instance, ours or otherwise.
Self-hosting the relay
When it ships, running your own server will not require a licence fee.
The one exception: calls on our relay
Text and media cost us very little to carry. Voice and video are different: relaying live media burns bandwidth and server capacity continuously, per minute, per participant, and there is no clever architecture that makes that free. We are paying for the public relay ourselves, so we do not expect to be able to give calls away on it.
Calling has now shipped, and during the public beta it is free on the public relay while we measure what it actually costs. Once the beta ends, expect voice and video on the public relay we operate to become paid, while messaging on it stays free. On your own relay, calls cost you whatever your own bandwidth costs and nothing to us. This is a bill we cannot absorb, not a feature we are holding back to create a paid tier — and it is the only part of Keylane where that is true.
Keeping the public relay free
The cost of the public network grows with the number of people using it, and our own money does not. Two things we may introduce, in this order of preference:
- Donations, or a voluntary paid plan. For people who want to support the network rather than buy anything. Donations are live: GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi, or a plain SEPA transfer. If a voluntary plan ever appears it will carry convenience, not privacy: no security feature will ever sit behind it.
- One-time purchases rather than subscriptions. A dedicated server or an on-premises deployment bought once, where a single payment fits what is actually being sold better than a recurring one.
Donations are live below; the voluntary plan is not, and neither is a condition of anything you use now. If the economics ever force a real change to what is free, it goes in the changelog with an explanation rather than appearing quietly on this page.
Support the project
A donation buys nothing and unlocks nothing — your account is identical to everyone else’s before and after. It pays server bills, and that is the point.
GitHub Sponsors
Monthly or one-time. Companies can sponsor through their existing GitHub billing and receive an invoice.
github.com/sponsors/LivotovLabs →SEPA transfer
The platform-free option. Note that a bank transfer necessarily shows us your name and IBAN — unlike the app, which shows us nothing.
Livotov Labs Ltd OOD
LT62 3250 0354 2508 2803
BIC REVOLT21 · Reference: Keylane support
What will cost money
What is sold is infrastructure, operational convenience, and support — never a privacy guarantee that free users go without. Nothing here is purchasable yet, and pricing will be published when it is.
| Product | For | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Voice and video calls on our public relay | Anyone calling through the relay we pay for | Shipped — free during the beta, paid after it |
| Dedicated server | Groups and organizations wanting their own instance, bought once | Planned |
| Managed private relay | Teams wanting a dedicated instance without operating it | Planned |
| On-premises deployment | Organizations with data-residency obligations | In development |
| Business features | Directory, provisioning, and administrative controls | Planned |
| Commercial support | Self-hosters wanting an SLA and a named contact | Planned |
| Donations | People who want the public relay to stay free for others | Live — Sponsors, Ko-fi, or SEPA |
| Voluntary supporter plan | Convenience perks, never security | Under consideration |
Why no investors
Outside investment is not free money — it is a claim on future decisions. An investor needs a return, and a messenger with no advertising and no data to sell is a slow way to produce one. The pressure that follows is predictable, and the history of privacy products acquiring investors and then acquiring an advertising business is not a short one.
Building on our own money is slower. It means a smaller team, a longer roadmap, and features arriving later than they would with a funding round behind them. We think that is the right trade for this particular product, because the alternative puts a countdown on the promises this page makes.
It also means we are accountable to users rather than to a board. If Keylane fails commercially, it fails as a product — it does not get pivoted into something that monetizes the people who trusted it.
What we commit to
-
No advertising, ever
Not in the app, not on this website. There is no analytics or tracking infrastructure to support it even if we wanted to.
-
No selling or sharing of user data
Structurally impossible for message content and the social graph, because we do not hold them. See server security.
-
Security features are never a paid tier
Encryption, metadata minimization, and privacy controls are identical for paying and non-paying users.
-
Federation stays open
Self-hosted instances will not be degraded or fenced out to make the managed product more attractive.
-
Changes to this page are announced
If the funding structure or the business model changes materially, it goes in the changelog rather than being edited in quietly.
Interested in a paid deployment?
Nothing is purchasable yet, but if you are evaluating Keylane for an organization, the constraints you are working under will shape what we build first. Tell us about them.