Your own relay, kept running for you

A relay of your own carries everything a direct message or group chat holds: photos, files and voice notes as well as text, still sealed, in pieces the relay cannot open. Knit ships with a public relay, listed and switched off until you turn relays on. It carries text and leaves attachments to the radios, so a photo sent while your friend is away waits until you are next in range.

It is also yours. A private relay answers only to phones holding its token, so the conversations on it are the ones you and your people put there. Share it with your family or your team, or keep it to yourself. Sizes and prices are on the Knit Hosted site.

Knit Hosted runs the same Knit Spool anyone can download, pinned to a public release. Nothing about the protocol changes because somebody else is paying for the electricity. Your phone seals every message before it leaves, the spool files the sealed copy under a random conversation number it cannot tie to a person, and the copy is deleted within 48 hours whether or not it was collected.

Because it is the same software, Knit cannot tell the difference, and neither can anyone reading the code. Knit Spool is AGPL, so the relay you are paying for is one you could audit line by line, or run on a spare box yourself, any time you like.

Your spool comes up at a random hostname under spool.getknit.app that says nothing about you. Its token is yours to read, change or remove from the dashboard. Change it and the old one keeps working until you retire it, so nobody's phone drops off. Remove it and the spool is open to anyone with the address.

Adding it to Knit works like adding any relay. Paste the connection string into Settings, or open the invite link the dashboard gives you, and Knit shows what the relay will see before it goes on. Every relay in the list has its own switch, so you can run it beside the public one and turn either off without deleting it.

A relay run by Knit's developer sees exactly what a relay run by anyone else sees, and nothing more. It holds ciphertext it has no key for. It can tell that some conversation is active, known to it as a long random number, how large each sealed copy is and when it arrived, and the IP addresses connecting to it. It never sees the messages, who is talking, who read what, or which other relays you use. Knit shows you this before any relay goes on, and it applies here unchanged.

Signing up means an account on the Knit Hosted site, for paying and for the dashboard, and that account stays there. Knit itself still has no accounts, no directory and no server side. The Knit Hosted site publishes its own privacy policy and terms, which say what it keeps.

To mark the launch, the code EARLY50 takes half off a Knit Hosted subscription for its first six months. Enter it in the discount field at checkout. The reduction stays on that subscription for six months from the day you redeem it, and from the seventh month it renews at the listed price.

The code is valid through 31 October 2026 for a limited number of redemptions. A subscription started on the last day of October still gets its full six months.