I'm Hampus Kraft, and I founded Fluxer Platform AB, the Swedish company that runs fluxer.com. This is the story of how Fluxer grew from a high school project into what it is today, and of all the testers and early users who helped me along the way.
When was Fluxer created?
I started building Fluxer as a high school project in 2020, and it took me about six years to get from the first prototype to the public beta that opened in January 2026.
- From 2020 to 2022, I built the first prototypes as a high school project.
- In July 2023, a few dozen testers got into a private alpha with text chat only.
- From 2023 to 2025, I built Fluxer privately while studying at KTH.
- In summer 2025, I registered Fluxer Platform AB.
- In September 2025, I finished my thesis and went full-time on Fluxer.
- In October 2025, the first private beta started with around 30 testers.
- In January 2026, fluxer.com opened to everyone as a public beta.
From a high school project to a public beta
The private alpha in July 2023 only had text chat, with no voice or video calls at all. I kept working on Fluxer for several years alongside my Computer Engineering studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and it grew from something very basic into a full chat app, much bigger and better than I had first imagined.
The testers tried every new build and told me what broke and what was hard to use. Many of them gave a lot of their own time, and I'm very grateful to them.
A chat app with text, voice, video and communities is a lot of work. I put years into that work, and I still write almost all the code for the backend, web app and desktop app.
My bachelor's thesis at KTH was published in September 2025, after I'd finished almost all of my courses, and I've worked on Fluxer full-time since then. The private beta I opened in October 2025 let its testers invite people they knew, and it already worked much like the public beta that opened to everyone a little over two months later.
When did Fluxer launch?
fluxer.com opened to everyone on 2 January 2026 and had only a few hundred accounts at first, and the work behind it goes back to my first prototypes in 2020.
February 2026 and the months after
On 9 February 2026, another chat app announced age verification, and people came looking for a new home while we still ran on a single server. More than 100,000 accounts were created in the 16 days after that, and the service struggled for a while.
Since then we've fixed a lot of infrastructure problems, made the service more stable and fought off spam and DDoS attacks, and we've also made self-hosting easier.
Thank you to everyone who joined during those weeks and stayed while things were rough. Many of you reported bugs and were patient with us while we fixed them.
How many people use Fluxer?
fluxer.com had more than 500,000 accounts on 19 October 2026, counting only accounts that still exist. That number leaves out deleted, bot and system accounts. It also leaves out every account on a self-hosted instance, since we don't have those.
We don't publish how many people are online on fluxer.com or how many use it each day. Counters on other websites aren't run by Fluxer, and we can't check their numbers.
How fast did Fluxer grow?
fluxer.com had a few hundred accounts in January 2026, and more than 100,000 accounts were created in the 16 days from 9 February 2026. A second wave of sign-ups came on 25 March 2026, and more people have joined since then.
Why you might not have heard of us
You might not have heard much about Fluxer or seen us around, because we haven't bought ads or run a marketing campaign yet. We wanted to make what we have stable and get the mobile apps into the App Store and Google Play before we did anything else.
The Android app came out on Google Play on 8 November 2026, which is half of item 1 on our roadmap. Our TestFlight beta for iOS is on hold for now, following a technical issue at Apple. As of 2 November 2026, we've addressed the last item from Apple's review, and we expect Fluxer to be on the App Store in early November 2026.
We started posting patch notes on our blog in October 2026, and you can follow them by RSS. After the iOS app is out on the App Store, we plan to post feature announcements on YouTube and in other places too, and to tell more people about Fluxer.
All our official accounts are listed on our company information page. Any other account that says it's Fluxer or that it speaks for our team isn't one of ours.
What I'm working on now
I still lead Fluxer's development, and what I want to make great next is self-hosting, federation and end-to-end encryption. Self-hosting is already free with no licence key, and federation, encrypted calls and encrypted DMs are on our roadmap.
My first idea for several instances was one app connected to all of them, and the desktop app already keeps them connected. Combining them into one view comes next, and federation will add a shared identity without turning Fluxer into another Matrix.
Fluxer has no venture capital or outside investors, and the people who use and support Fluxer fund it. Plutonium is what lets us stay independent.
I also want Fluxer to be easy to move to from the chat apps people use today. It's compatible with large parts of Discord's API, and many Discord bots can be ported to it with small changes. Fluxer webhooks also accept Slack's incoming webhook format.
The longer version
I wrote down the whole history, from my first prototypes to registering the company and opening the first beta, in How I built Fluxer, a longer post on our blog.