Hearth is a group chat that lives on your server — not a company's cloud. No caps on photos or video, no accounts, and nobody reading your messages but the people you invite.
Every other chat app rations your space and mines your messages. Hearth can't — because it's running on hardware you own.
Drop a 4GB video or a thousand full-res photos. There's no upload cap, no "upgrade for more storage" — it's just your NAS.
No accounts, no phone numbers, no company in the middle. Your messages live on your box and can't be sold, scanned, or leaked in someone else's breach.
Send a link. They open it, pick a name, they're in. Make channels however you want. No sign-ups, no friction.
Install it to your home screen, get push notifications — it feels like a real messenger, because it is. iPhone and Android.
Jump into a voice or video call with everyone by the fire — peer-to-peer, through your own server.
No subscription for the chat itself, no rug-pull, no shutdown email. As long as your box is on, your Hearth is lit.
Hearth is free — every feature, no tiers, no upsells inside the app. The only choice is where it lives.
The easiest home for Hearth. One command turns a mini PC or NAS into a TomSparkBox — Hearth included free, next to 35+ other self-hosted apps, with updates handled from one dashboard.
Already run a home server? Hearth is a free image — one command and it's up. It tells you in-app when an update is out.
docker run -d --name hearth \ -p 8080:8080 \ -v hearth-data:/app/data \ --restart unless-stopped \ tomsparkreal/hearth:latest
No hardware, no setup — pay, and your private Hearth is running at yourname.hearthchat.net with the invite link in your email about a minute later. Hosted Hearths run sealed: messages, photos, videos, and voice notes are encrypted on your device with a key that travels only inside your invites, so our servers store scrambled data they cannot read. To be precise about what that covers — because a vague promise is worth nothing — sealing protects the contents. Our server still necessarily sees who is in the chat (names and profile photos), who posted when and in reply to whom, reactions, and the name, type, and size of each file, since it has to store and deliver them. Removing someone changes the join code, not the key, so treat invite links like house keys until key reset ships. The hosted guide spells all of this out. And unlike Discord, your $5 is the entire business model — no ads, no data mining, nothing else to sell. Want zero trust in anyone, including us? That's what the SparkBox lane is for.
1. Run the command above, then open http://your-server-ip:8080 in a browser.
2. The first person to join becomes the admin. Everyone joins with a join code — Hearth prints a temporary one in docker logs hearth, or set your own with -e HEARTH_JOIN_CODE=something-only-your-people-know. From inside the app, the Invite button gives your people a one-tap link + QR code.
3. To reach it away from home, put it behind HTTPS the way you would any self-hosted app — a reverse proxy with DuckDNS, a Cloudflare tunnel, or Tailscale. (A SparkBox sets this up for you — that's why it's the recommended lane.)
4. Updating: Hearth tells the admin in-app when a new version is out. Then it's docker pull tomsparkreal/hearth:latest and recreate the container — your messages and uploads live in the hearth-data volume and survive updates.
5. Want end-to-end encryption? Start a new install with -e HEARTH_SEALED=1 and serve it over https: messages, photos, videos, and voice notes all get encrypted on your devices — the server itself can't read them. It still stores the surrounding details it needs to work: who's in the chat, timestamps, and each file's name, type, and size. (On your own box sealing is optional, since you already own the server. Sealed Hearths trade away link previews, and search runs on your devices instead of the server.)
Windows & Linux. Type your Hearth's address once — it remembers your servers, keeps you signed in, and updates itself. Works with sealed Hearths.
Also as a .deb. Windows will show an "unknown publisher" warning — the installer isn't code-signed yet. Click More info → Run anyway. No install needed otherwise: Hearth runs in any browser and installs on your phone as a real app with notifications.
Hearth started as a backer perk — the backers who funded it made it good enough to give to everyone. It's free on every SparkBox, free to self-host, and soon we can host one for you. If you want to fund what gets built next, that door is open.