The Chatto Timeline
I’m building Chatto, a fully-featured group chat application that also happens to be simple and free to self-host. I recently announced the availability of a public development instance that you can try out, and the response has been really encouraging, with people reporting bugs and giving feedback, which I appreciate tremendously.
To give everyone a better idea of how things are going to progress from here, I wanted to share a high-level timeline for this project. (I’m also working on a feature roadmap, but that will be a separate post.)
The Timeline
Notice that I haven’t attached any dates to the milestones below; but generally speaking, I expect this timeline to span the better part of 2026.
January 2026: Launch of Development Instance! There's now a development instance you can log in to and play around with. It's ephemeral on purpose, meaning that all data will be deleted on March 1st, 2026. I'm doing this because breaking changes are still likely to happen, and I can't afford to build data migrations this early in the project. (Chatto doesn't use a traditional SQL database under the hood, and data migrations are a little more involved.)
Launch of Official Chatto Instance: Once things have stabilized to an extent that I feel stuff generally works reliably and major breaking changes are unlikely, I'm setting up an official Chatto instance. Its primary purpose is to provide community support and, of course, dogfood the application.
Launch of Chatto Cloud: A hosted service that lets you have your own private Chatto instance (with its own user accounts, spaces and rooms) for a reasonable monthly fee. Use this if you want early access to Chatto (before the binaries and source code become available), or just generally prefer to throw money my way instead of self-hosting it yourself.
(Unlike the test instance mentioned earlier, you will be able to migrate your data to a self-hosted instance later! Also, of course, vice versa.)
Binaries Available: This is the one you're waiting for if you want to self-host Chatto. You can now download pre-compiled binaries for your favorite operating system, and there's some basic documentation on how to get you started. (Don't worry; unlike other apps in this space, Chatto is designed to be almost comically easy to self-host.)
Open Source Release: I'm opening the Chatto repository and making its source code available. You can now build Chatto from source, contribute to its development, or just audit the code for security and privacy.
I realize that if you’re eager to self-host Chatto or dive into the source code, this timeline may seem a bit daunting. But please don’t be frustrated; I simply want to make sure that the foundations are solid in order to prevent headaches and disappointments down the road.
Get in touch!
Having said this, I’m looking for companies and organizations — Open Source projects in particular! — who would be interested in early access to Chatto Cloud or even pre-release binaries in exchange for feedback, bug reports, and just general testing. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, please get in touch!
If you just want to follow along, you can come hang out on the dev instance, follow me on Bluesky for frequent development updates, or sign up for email notifications to get the big announcements only: