Fold
Fold is one calm home for every conversation — your family, your closest friends, the group chat, the community you love. Your messages are private the moment you send them, and they stay yours. It feels as easy as the app you use now — it’s just built for you, instead of for advertisers.
The app that doesn’t make you choose.
Every app you already use asks you to give something up. WhatsApp reaches everyone, but you and your friends are the product. Signal is truly private, but it can feel like a bunker. Discord is warm and alive, but nothing you say there is really private.
For years the only choice was which compromise to live with. Fold is the one that doesn’t ask you to make it — as easy as the app you know, as private as the one you wish it was, and warm enough for everyone to gather in.
Everything you talk on, in one place.
Chats, groups, calls, communities and more — each one private, each one yours. Turn on what you need; anything you don’t is simply gone, not lurking in a menu waiting to nudge you.
Message anyone
Fast, private one-to-one and group chats that feel like the app you already use — they’re just yours, and nobody in the middle can read them.
Groups that grow with you
Start a simple group, then add channels and announcements as it grows — without moving anywhere, changing apps, or losing a single message of your history.
Talk, and drop in
Voice calls one-to-one, and always-on rooms you can wander into and out of — like a kitchen table everyone’s gathered around, nobody has to ring.
An extra-private mode
When it really matters, turn on the quieter setting and even the network can’t tell when you’re talking or who with. One tap, and it’s on.
Ask your own chats
Forgot what the group decided? Ask, and get the actual message back — with a link to who said it. It all happens on your device.
A page that’s yours
Share a page when you want to. No follower counts, no likes, no algorithm deciding who sees it — just you, and the people who choose to read.
Fold runs today on Mac, Windows and Linux — and from a plain terminal, if that’s your thing. Phones are on the way. It’s ad-free, and always will be.
It starts with one honest question.
No phone number. No forms. You pick a name people can call you, and Fold asks one thing:
Your answer is the whole setup. It quietly decides how much Fold keeps for you — and it’s the moment being anonymous stops being a scary “mode” and becomes a plain choice anyone can make.
You can always get back inmost people
Fold keeps an encrypted backup for you — one that only you hold the key to.
Lose your phone and every way back in, and even we can’t restore it.
Nothing to find, nothing to lose
Fold keeps no lasting copy of who you are or what you said.
Lose your keys and the account is gone for good — which is exactly the point.
Just for now
Only what’s needed to deliver a message, and it fades on a schedule.
Someone you’ve written to can still keep what they already received.
Getting back in is a card you can print and keep on the fridge — not a secret 24-word code — plus your other devices, and, if you like, a couple of people you trust who can approve a new phone but can never read a word you wrote.
See exactly who can read what.
Most apps hand you a padlock and ask you to trust it. Fold gives you a receipt instead — a plain-language note on every conversation that tells you who can read it, what happens if you lose your phone, and anyone else who’s in the room. If something changes, you see it.
Private
Just the people in the chat, and no one else — not us, not the network. This is almost everything you do.
Managed
For work: still encrypted, but your employer’s systems are in the room too. You’re told in plain words before you join or send — never by surprise.
Public
A page or post you meant to share. It’s honest about being public: it’s for reaching people, not for keeping secrets.
Bots, assistants and archives never hide. They show up as someone in the room, with a name and a face — adding one looks exactly like adding a person. And every receipt tells you what it still can’t hide, because a promise you can’t check is just a nicer padlock.
Private, and it stays that way.
You don’t need to know how any of this works to be safe — that’s the point. But here’s the short version, in plain words.
No one reads your messages — not even us
They’re scrambled the moment you hit send, and only unscramble on the phones of the people you’re talking to. In between, there’s nothing to read.
Safe against tomorrow’s computers
Fold locks your messages with new maths built to hold up even against the powerful quantum computers that don’t exist yet — so a message saved today can’t be opened later.
Checked by people who aren’t us
The encryption at its heart has been independently audited, and Fold is open source — anyone in the world can read the code and check for themselves.
No phone number, no real name
An account is just a name people can call you. Nothing ties it to the real you unless you decide it should — and you can decide otherwise.
A few promises we won’t quietly break.
Private by default.
Encryption is on from your very first message. There’s no setting to find and switch on, because nothing was ever switched off.
No ads. You’re never the product.
The way Fold makes money can never involve reading your messages — so it never will. That’s a decision baked in from the start, not a line in a policy that can change.
Nothing forced on you.
Open Fold and it’s a calm, quiet chat app. Turn a feature off and it’s truly gone — no notifications, no nagging, nothing quietly running in the background to pull you back.
It’s yours to take, or leave.
Move or export everything whenever you like, and bring your old Facebook and Instagram archives in through a real door, not a scraper. Leaving is a feature, not a punishment.
Built to last.
Set up so it can’t be quietly bought and hollowed out — because trust dies the moment the owner changes, and you deserve to believe Fold will still be Fold in ten years.
We’d rather tell you the truth.
Most apps promise the moon. Fold has a habit of telling you exactly what it can and can’t do — the same habit that puts a plain receipt on every conversation. A few things worth knowing:
We can see that you sent a message — roughly when, and how big — but never what it says.
Once you’ve sent something, it lives on the other person’s phone too. Fold can’t reach over and un-send it for you.
On a call, someone learns it happened — either us, quietly routing it, or the person you called. Fold tells you which, and never pretends there’s a third option.
If you publish a public page, it’s public: anyone can read it. Fold won’t rank it, push it, or show it to strangers — but it can’t make it private, either.
Fold is early. The heart of it runs today; phones and bigger communities are still on the way, and we’d rather say so than pretend.
Fold, on the machine in front of you.
The desktop app runs today on macOS, Windows and Linux. Every download links to the newest build, and carries a signature beside it so you can check that what you got is what was built.
work="$(mktemp -d)" && curl -fL 'https://dl.bruket.co/latest/Fold-macOS-AppleSilicon.dmg' -o "$work/Fold.dmg" && mkdir "$work/mount" && hdiutil attach "$work/Fold.dmg" -nobrowse -mountpoint "$work/mount" && ditto "$work/mount/Fold.app" '/Applications/Fold.app' && hdiutil detach "$work/mount"A browser marks what it downloads, and macOS then refuses to open it until you go through System Settings → Privacy & Security. The command above does not put that mark on, so Fold opens the first time you ask it to.
It does not mean Apple has approved Fold. This build is signed only by itself — you are choosing to trust it, and the signature beside the download is how you check that.
Windows may show a blue “Windows protected your PC” box — More info, then Run anyway.
Make the AppImage executable and run it. It is the build that can update itself in place.
Every download has a signature next to it, and the Fold release public key verifies them. Fold checks for new versions itself and updates when you say so.
Privacy you can read — not just believe.
One place for everyone you know. Private from the first message, honest about the rest, and yours to keep. That’s Fold.