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Hosted knit-spool

A spool of your own, without a server of your own.

Knit carries messages phone to phone. A spool carries them further — across the internet, to the people out of range — and holds them sealed until they connect. Yours comes with its own hostname and token, sized to the devices you bring, and we keep it running.

knit-spool is open source. Run your own, or let us.

k3vq7m2xw6zr4nbp.spool.getknit.appRunning

Devices

37of 100

Storage

41.0 MiBof 256 MiB

Connection string

wss://k3vq7m2xw6zr4nbp.spool.getknit.app/spool/v1?k=••••••••••••

Token set · rotate any time

Illustrative — a Team spool as the dashboard shows it.

How it works

Three steps, then it stays up.

How a spool sits between devicesNearby, over Bluetooth and Wi-FiYour spoolsealed framesAnywhere, over the internet
  1. Pick a plan

    Personal, Team or Org — the same spool at three device ceilings, paid a month in advance. As soon as the payment lands, your spool starts on our fleet.

  2. Get your address

    Your spool comes up at its own hostname under spool.getknit.app — sixteen random characters that say nothing about you — with its own certificate. We email you when it answers, and the connection string is on your dashboard.

  3. Point Knit at it

    Add the connection string in Knit. From then on, messages for anyone out of range wait on the spool, sealed, and arrive when they connect.

Blind by design

A relay that cannot read what it carries.

Knit seals every message on the device before it leaves. A spool stores and forwards those sealed frames by conversation, and that is all it can do with them.

The spool sees

  • Conversation ids, derived so they map to nobody
  • Sealed frames, and how big they are
  • Attachment ids
  • When frames arrive

The spool never sees

  • Who you are, or who is in a conversation
  • What any message says
  • Who read what
  • Which other spools your devices use

And what we keep about you

An email address, a billing reference and an instance id — and nothing that ties them to a conversation: no conversation ids, no connection logs, no client addresses. Your hostname is random, so it does not lead back to you either.

Read the whole notice

What you get

Yours to run, without running it.

  • Your own hostname and certificate

    Sixteen random characters under spool.getknit.app, covered by one wildcard certificate we renew. Your hostname never appears in a public certificate log.

  • A token you control

    Read it any time, set your own, or rotate it: the spool accepts the old and the new until you promote one, so no device drops. Remove it, and the spool is open.

  • Open, with proof-of-work

    Run an open spool for anyone with the address. Proof-of-work is on by default, so connecting costs a little compute and flooding costs a lot.

  • A commons you can name

    One shared room for everyone on your spool. You mint the invite; we keep only a hash of it, so we relay the room without ever being able to join it. Starting or renaming the room is the one change that restarts the spool.

  • Settings that apply live

    Token, proof-of-work and per-address limits change in the running spool — no restart, no dropped device.

  • Usage you can see

    Devices connected and storage used, as a meter today and as a chart over the month. Counts, never conversations.

Plans

Priced by the device.

One device is one connection at a time. Every plan is the same spool; the ceiling is the only difference.

  • Personal

    $5/month per spool

    Up to 10 devices at once

    Get a spool
  • Team

    $10/month per spool

    Up to 100 devices at once

    Get a spool
  • Org

    $50/month per spool

    Up to 2,000 devices at once

    Get a spool

Beyond 2,000 devices

There is no self-serve price above Org. Tell us what you are running and we will size a spool for it.

Talk to us

Compare plans and billing

Open source

Run your own, or let us.

The hosted spool runs the same open-source daemon you can run yourself. Knit works with either — or with several at once.

knit-spool, on your box

  • Free software, AGPL, on GitHub
  • One docker compose file, with Caddy or Nginx for TLS
  • Small enough for a 1 GB box
  • Every setting yours, end to end

A hosted spool

  • The same daemon, pinned to a public release
  • Hostname, certificate and renewals handled
  • Sized to your plan, on hardware in the EU
  • Token rotation, a commons and usage charts from a dashboard

knit-spool on GitHub

Questions

Asked before you did.

What is a spool, exactly?

A small relay for Knit's internet plane. Knit's mesh carries messages phone to phone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi; a spool carries them over the internet to the people who are not nearby, holding each message sealed until its recipient connects.

It cannot read them. Every message is sealed on the device before it leaves, and the spool never learns who is talking to whom.

Do I need a spool to use Knit?

No. Knit works phone to phone out of the box. A spool adds reach — the people who are not in range — and a place for messages to wait. You can use one, several, or none.

Why not just run knit-spool myself?

You can, and it costs nothing: knit-spool is free software under the AGPL and runs from one docker compose file.

A hosted spool is for when you would rather not own a server. We handle the hostname, the certificate, sizing and updates; you manage the token, a commons and usage from a dashboard.

What does “device” mean on a plan?

One connection at a time. A plan's ceiling is how many devices can be connected to the spool at once — not how many people have ever used it.

Can you read our messages?

No — not by policy, by construction. The spool receives sealed frames it cannot open, filed under conversation ids it cannot map to a person.

Our control plane sees even less: it keeps your email address, a billing reference and an instance id, and takes counts from the spool — devices connected, bytes stored — never content.

Give your group a spool.

Personal from $5 a month. Paid a month at a time; cancel and it runs to the end of the month you paid for.