What you get, without paying for it.
These are the service's actual limits, not a free tier designed to run out. Nothing on this list is sold back to you a month at a time.
Somewhere to talk that stays yours.
Cordice is a chat service for friends and communities. Servers, channels, voice, streams, files — the things you already expect — built as free software anyone can read, change and run themselves.
Free to use. No advertising. Nothing sold to anyone.
What it does
Everything a chat app should already do.
A place per subject
Channels for the things you talk about, sorted into categories, with roles that decide who sees what. It works the same for six people as for six thousand.
Voice, video and streams
Drop into a voice channel, turn a camera on, or share your screen at full resolution — the whole room watches it happen at once. No scheduling, no meeting link, no waiting room.
Send the actual file
Twenty megabytes each, five at a time. Photos and video play where they land; everything else arrives exactly as you sent it.
Find it again
Search a channel by word or by who said it, instead of scrolling for ten minutes hoping to recognise it.
Keep it civil
Timeouts, bans, and a record of who did what, so the people looking after a community can work without stepping on each other.
Yours to look at
Light, dark, or whatever your system is already doing — and further than that if you enjoy fiddling.
No paywall
- 20 MB
- per file, five at a time
- 2 000
- characters in a message
- 1080p
- video and screen sharing
- 100
- custom emoji per server
- 200
- roles, and as many channels
- 100
- people in a group chat
Why this one
And a few things most of them don't.
The basics are not a subscription.
Custom emoji, animated avatars, a profile banner, a file limit you can live with. These are ordinary features of a chat app, not a product to be sold back to you a month at a time.
You can read the whole thing.
Every line of Cordice is out in the open. You do not have to take our word for what happens to your messages — anyone can go and check.
Nobody is buying your attention.
No advertising means no reason to make the app louder than it needs to be. Nothing here is tuned to keep you in it, and a quiet week costs us nothing.
The exit stays open.
Anyone can run Cordice on their own machine, using the same code we do. A service you cannot leave is not one you chose, and that stays true even if we change our minds.
Questions
Questions people actually ask.
The ones that arrive by mail, answered once here so nobody has to ask them twice.
Is it actually free?
Yes. No paid tier, no advertising, and nothing about you being sold. It costs us money to run and we pay for it; if that ever has to change, it will be said here before it does.
Can anyone read my messages?
Not other users. We could, in the sense that any service holding your history could — we are not going to pretend otherwise, and what we do keep is set out in the privacy notice.
Can I bring my community over?
Make a server, send the invite link, and people are in. What we cannot do is carry across an old platform's history — that starts fresh.
Who is behind it?
One person, with help, working in the open rather than behind a company nobody can find. The name and a working address are in the imprint.
Is it finished?
No — it is version 0.1.0. It runs and it is used, but things change between releases and some things are missing. If you need a guaranteed service, this is not yet it.
Getting started
Moving a community takes an evening.
- 1
Make the server
One button. Name it, give it an icon, and you have a place — no approval queue and no sales call.
- 2
Lay out the channels
Categories, text and voice channels, and roles that decide who sees what. Copy the shape you already had elsewhere.
- 3
Send one link
Invites are links. People follow yours, land in the right channel, and start talking without installing anything.
Bring your people over.
It takes a minute to make a server, and nothing to try it. If something is broken or missing, tell us in the open.