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Bronze Venture LLC Bronze Venture LLC

OpenChime

Team chat you can host yourself.

OpenChime is built around one decision that everything else follows from: the server holds the data, and you choose who runs the server. Run it on your own hardware and nobody else is involved at all. Buy a hosted workspace and we run the machine for you, on terms that are written down rather than implied.

What it is

The server is a single native binary. No runtime to install, no interpreter, no container required. It comes from apt or dnf, runs under systemd, and keeps its data in one directory you can back up with the tool you already use. It is open source, so an operator who wants no dependency on us whatsoever can build it from source and never contact us again.

The clients are real applications rather than a web page in a wrapper. Each platform gets a client built for it over one shared core, so what you run is something your operating system recognises as a program: it starts quickly, it respects the system's conventions, and it does not ship a browser engine to draw a message list.

A few things genuinely cannot be self-run. Push notification delivery needs Apple and Google credentials that only a publisher can hold. Those are offered as opt-in services, each one declinable on its own. Decline all of them and you are left with a deployment that talks to nobody but itself — which is a supported configuration, not a degraded one.

Three ways to run it

Self-hosted, standalone

You run the server, you hold the data, and nothing reaches us. Free, and it stays free.

Self-hosted, federated

You still run the server and own every message. You opt in to the services you want, one at a time, and to nothing else.

Hosted

We provision and operate the machine. You get the product without the operations. This is the tier that is paid for.

The Privacy Notice says exactly what the hosted tier means: what sits on our machines, who at this company can reach it, and the only occasions on which anyone does.