Twenty Years of Giving Something Away
What I’ve learned from running a free messaging app for two decades — and why the model still surprises people who hear about it.
In June 2006, my brother and I quietly added a download link to a website. No press release. No launch plan. Just a small file that let anyone who wanted to talk to someone else, somewhere else, do it for free.
We didn’t really mark the date. We were busy building the business version of the same software, and the free one felt like a side door we’d left open on purpose. People came in through it anyway. They told their families. Their families told their friends. Twenty years later, that side door is still open.
I’ve been thinking about what that actually means. Not the milestone itself — milestones are easy to write thank-you notes about. I mean the strange, quiet experience of running something for two decades that was never supposed to make money, and watching it keep working.
The thing about giving something away
When you give something away, you change what the product is allowed to be.
That sounds abstract, so let me put it plainly. If a messaging app has to pay for itself, sooner or later it has to sell something. Usually it’s your attention — ads, suggestions, nudges to open it more often. Sometimes it’s your data — who you talk to, when, from where, about what, inferred from the metadata even when the messages themselves are encrypted. Sometimes it’s a subscription, which is the most honest version, but still pulls the product toward features that justify the price tag rather than features that justify the trust.
None of that is evil. It’s just gravity. A product has to feed itself, and the way it feeds itself slowly becomes who it is.
When the product doesn’t have to feed itself, that gravity disappears. We never had a meeting about how to get people to open Chatox more often. We never debated whether to put a small ad in the sidebar “just to cover server costs”. The server costs are covered by Brosix, the business app we sell to companies. The personal one stays free because the business one pays for it. That’s the whole arrangement, and it’s been the whole arrangement since 2006.
What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time is how much that one decision quietly shaped every other decision we’d make for the next twenty years. When you don’t need someone to stay in the app, you stop designing for stickiness. When you don’t need their data, you stop collecting it, which means you stop having to protect it, which means you stop having to think about it at all. The app gets smaller. Calmer. Easier to explain to your mother.
What people actually want from a chat app
I talk to people about messaging more than is probably healthy. Friends, family, strangers at conferences, the occasional taxi driver who asks what I do. And the thing I keep noticing is that most people don’t want more from their messaging app. They want less.
They want to send a message to their sister and have it arrive. They want to see their grandchild on a video call without installing three things and creating an account. They want to share a photo without it being compressed into mush, or a document without it bouncing back because it’s too big for email. They want the app to open quickly, work, and then go away until they need it again.
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That’s it. That’s the whole brief.
The industry has spent a long time pretending the brief is bigger than that — stories, statuses, channels, communities, AI assistants, shopping, payments, mini-apps inside the app. Some of that is genuinely useful to some people. Most of it is there because the business model demands engagement, and engagement demands surface area, and surface area demands features nobody asked for.
When we sat down in 2006 and decided what the free personal version should do, we made a list that has barely changed since: text, files, voice, video, screen sharing. The things a person actually uses to stay close to another person. We’ve added polish over the years, made it work on more devices, kept the encryption current. But the shape of it — the answer to the question “what is this for?” — is the same shape it had on day one.
I think that’s why it’s still here. Not because we were clever. Because we didn’t have a reason to make it into something else.
The slow kind of trust
There’s a thing that happens when something exists for a long time without changing its promise. People start to trust it differently.
Not the loud kind of trust, where someone writes a review or posts about it. The slow kind. The kind where someone installs it for their parents and doesn’t have to explain anything. The kind where a family group has been using the same chat for a decade and nobody’s ever had a reason to move. The kind where you forget the app is even a company, because it just feels like a thing that exists.
That slow trust is, I think, the only thing worth optimizing for if you’re building something like this. It’s not measurable on a dashboard. It compounds quietly. It survives whole cycles of hype around other apps, because it isn’t competing on the same axis as the apps that come and go.
I’m not romantic about it. I know most people will use whatever their friends use, and that the giants of messaging will keep being the giants of messaging. We don’t try to compete with them on scale, and we never have. What we offer is an alternative for the people who, for whatever reason, want one — people who don’t want their family chat sitting next to ads, people who don’t want to give a phone number to a stranger to send a file, people who remember what online chat felt like before it was an industry.
That’s a smaller audience than the giants serve. It’s still millions of people over twenty years. It’s enough.
What I keep coming back to
When I think about the original moment — 1997, the first time I sent a message to a stranger on the other side of the world and got a reply back in seconds — what I remember isn’t the technology. It’s the feeling. That something impossible had become casual. That the distance between two people had collapsed into a sentence.
Most of what’s been added to messaging since then has been added on top of that feeling, not in service of it. Twenty years of running a free app has mostly taught me that the original feeling is still the point. Everything else is decoration, and most decoration eventually gets in the way.
If you’ve been part of this — if you’ve used Chatox at any point in the last two decades, or you found it through a friend or a family member who found it through someone else — thank you. Genuinely. None of this works without people quietly passing it along.
What’s the oldest piece of software you still use, and what made you stay with it?
- Stefan Chekanov, Founder, Chatox
