About NOX
// one developer, one vision, no committeeWhy this exists
The chat apps that 99% of the internet uses ask for your phone number. Most of them sell metadata. The few that don't are either single-purpose (Signal) or institutional and monetised. I wanted a privacy-first chat app for ongoing communities — servers, channels, voice rooms, real-time everything — that didn't ask who I was. So I built one.
NOX is what I would have wanted as a user. Communities. Voice. Servers and channels. Real-time everything. Without the parts that only exist because the company running the chat needed to make money off you.
What I refuse to compromise on
- No identity collection at signup. One field — username. Not email. Not phone. Not "verify with your Google account." If a feature needs your email or phone to work, I find another way to build the feature.
- No ads, ever. The product is the chat — not you. The moment a chat app starts selling your attention, the design starts working against you. NOX never crosses that line.
- No telemetry, no third-party SDKs. No analytics calls, no behavioural fingerprinting, no Sentry pinging your IP. The site you're on right now self-hosts its fonts so Google doesn't even know you visited.
- Self-hostable, eventually. Phase 2 of the roadmap. The whole codebase is portable on purpose: Postgres + Redis + Node, no proprietary cloud APIs. If I ever stop maintaining this, you can take your community to your own server.
- End-to-end encryption where it matters. Direct messages use the Signal Protocol. The keys never leave your device. Even with full database access I can't read encrypted DMs — by construction.
What this is not
NOX is not a startup. There is no team, no funding round, no exit strategy. There's no "Series A coming soon" pitch deck. I'm not optimising for growth metrics — I'm optimising for the app being good and the operator (currently me) being trustworthy.
NOX is also not open-source. I get the question often. The reasoning is in the roadmap: closed-source on the server side keeps a single source of truth for the privacy guarantees, and stops bad-faith forks from launching "NOX clones" that look like NOX but lie about what they collect. The client-side binary is open for inspection (it's all JavaScript shipped to your browser) — what stays closed is the server I run.
How to reach me
The fastest way is [email protected]. Bug reports, feature requests, security disclosures, "hey I love this", "hey I hate this" — all welcome. There's also an in-app bug-report button (Settings → Help → Report a bug) which is faster for product-specific stuff.
For security disclosures specifically, please write before publishing. Even small projects deserve responsible disclosure, and I'll get to it within a day.
If you want to help
Use it, tell people about it, file good bug reports. That's it — that's the ask. NOX doesn't need money, doesn't need contributors yet, doesn't need press. It needs users who care about the same things and will say so out loud when something breaks.