# A Knit Spool of your own, without a server of your own.

Knit carries messages phone to phone. A Knit Spool carries them further — across the internet, to the people out of range — and holds them sealed until they connect. Knit Hosted gives you one of your own, with its own hostname and token, sized to the devices you bring, and keeps it running.

## Three steps, then it stays up.

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.

## 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, and the size of each chunk
- 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.

## 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.
- **Photos and files, not just text.** An attachment takes the same sealed path a message does: split into chunks, held until the other device connects, put back together there. The spool stores the chunks and never sees the picture. A free public spool refuses attachments; your own carries them.
- **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.

## Priced by the device.

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

| Plan | Devices | Per spool, per month |
|---|---|---|
| Personal | Up to 10 devices at once | $5 |
| Team | Up to 100 devices at once | $10 |
| Org | Up to 2,000 devices at once | $50 |

**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.

## Run your own, or let us.

Knit Hosted runs the same open-source Knit Spool you can run yourself. Knit works with either — or with several at once.

### 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

### On Knit Hosted

- 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

## Asked before you did.

### What is a spool, exactly?

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.

### 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.

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.

### 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 we send photos over the spool?

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.

### 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.

[Get a spool](https://hosted.getknit.app/sign-up) · [See pricing](https://hosted.getknit.app/pricing)