Asked before you did.

A Knit Spool is 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.

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.

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

Knit Hosted 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.

For a bounded window — seven days by default in the current Knit Spool release. When a spool is full, the least-active conversation is dropped first. It is a relay, not an archive: Knit keeps your messages on your devices.

Yes. An attachment is sealed on the device like any message, split into chunks, and held until the other device connects. The spool stores the chunks and can open none of them: it sees an id and a size, never a picture.

Attachments share your spool's sealed storage and its holding window with everything else, and when the spool is full the least-active conversation is dropped first. Knit keeps the original on your devices, so the spool is the way across rather than the copy you keep.

This is one reason to have your own. A free public spool refuses attachments, because whoever runs an open one pays for the storage every photo takes.

Copy the connection string from your dashboard and add it in Knit. It contains the hostname and, on a private spool, the token. Change the token later and the old string keeps working until you promote the new one.

One shared room on your spool that everyone holding the invite can join, still sealed end to end. You mint the invite from the dashboard and it is shown once; we keep only a hash of it, so we can relay the room but never read or join it. You can give the room a name, which Knit shows to devices that connect.

Yes. Remove the token and anyone with the address can connect. Proof-of-work switches on by default when you do, so each connection costs a device a little compute and a flood costs a lot; you can tune it under Settings.

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.

It is reachable, not findable. The label is sixteen random characters chosen by us, never derived from you, and one wildcard certificate covers the whole fleet, so your hostname is never written into a public certificate log.

On Hetzner Cloud in the EU — Nuremberg, Helsinki or Falkenstein — behind Caddy for TLS, from a Knit Spool release pinned by digest. This site and its database run in Frankfurt.

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.

When you buy a plan's first spool, for the month ahead; then on that day each month. Adding a spool to a plan you already have puts the rest of the current month on the plan's next invoice, prorated, with nothing charged on the spot.

Cancel a plan from your billing page and every spool on it keeps running at full service until the end of the month you paid for. Then they are removed along with their data, and the plan stops renewing. Until that day, one click keeps it. Deleting a single spool is different: it stops today, and from the next renewal the plan is charged only for the spools still running.

Not as a rule. A month is the unit: you pay for one ahead, and cancelling a plan lets you use the rest of it rather than returning it. If you want a spool gone today, you can delete it and forfeit the remainder.

If your spool was never delivered, or you are a consumer in the EU or UK withdrawing within fourteen days of buying, write to us and the unused part is refunded; the terms have the details.

Not from the dashboard yet. Email sales@getknit.app and we will move your spool to the plan you need.

4 per workspace to start, on any mix of plans. That ceiling is a guard against abuse rather than a plan limit; email support@getknit.app and we will raise it.

Nothing is deleted over a failed payment. Your spools keep running while the payment is retried, and you get an email. Only if the retries run out does the plan begin to wind down — 7 days past the renewal date.

Yes. A spool belongs to a workspace, not to the person who signed up. Invite people to the workspace and they see the same dashboard; administrators can buy, cancel and change settings.

Delete the workspace. Every spool in it runs to the end of the month already paid for and is then removed with its data; nothing renews.