--- title: "The story of Fluxer" description: "How Fluxer grew from a high school project into an open source Discord alternative with more than 500,000 accounts, told by its founder." url: "https://fluxer.com/help/story-of-fluxer" language: "en" last_updated: "2026-11-01" category: "About Fluxer" --- > Index of Fluxer's official pages for AI agents: https://fluxer.com/llms.txt > Links to Fluxer pages go to their Markdown versions when they have one. For other Fluxer help, policy or blog links, remove any #section part and add .md to the end. # The story of Fluxer How Fluxer grew from a high school project into an open source Discord alternative with more than 500,000 accounts, told by its founder. I'm Hampus Kraft, and I founded [Fluxer Platform AB](https://fluxer.com/help/who-runs-fluxer.md), the Swedish company that runs fluxer.com. This is the story of how Fluxer got to where it is today. ## From a high school project to a public beta Fluxer started as my high school project, and I built its first prototypes between 2020 and 2022. In July 2023 it became a small private alpha for a group of a few dozen testers, and at that point it only had text chat, with no voice or video calls at all. I kept developing Fluxer in private for years alongside my Computer Engineering studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Over that time it grew from something very basic into a full Discord alternative, much bigger and better than I first imagined. The testers tried new builds and told me what broke and what was hard to use. Many of them gave a lot of their own time to help make Fluxer what it is today. Building a chat app with text, voice, video and communities is a lot of work, which is one reason there are few credible Discord alternatives. 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. In October 2025, I opened the first private beta for a small group of around 30 testers who could also invite people they knew. It already worked much like the public beta that opened to everyone in January 2026, a little over two months later. ## February 2026 and the months after On February 9, 2026, another chat app announced age verification, and people came looking for an alternative while we still ran on a single server. More than 100,000 accounts were created in the 16 days starting that day, and [the service struggled at first](https://fluxer.com/help/stability.md). 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. fluxer.com passed 500,000 accounts on October 19, 2026 and keeps growing. ## 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 is in the Google Play beta, and its full release is [item 1 on our roadmap](https://fluxer.com/blog/roadmap-2026.md) planned for 2026. Our TestFlight beta for iOS is [on hold for now](https://fluxer.com/help/ios-testflight.md), following a technical issue at Apple, and our App Store release is almost ready. As of November 2, 2026, we've addressed the last item from Apple's review, and we expect Fluxer to be [on the App Store](https://fluxer.com/help/fluxer-app-store.md) in early November 2026. After that, we'll start putting ourselves out there more. We started posting patch notes on [our blog](https://fluxer.com/blog.md) in October 2026, and you can follow them by [RSS](https://fluxer.com/blog/rss.xml). After the full release of the apps on the App Store and Google Play, we plan to post feature announcements on YouTube and in other places too. ## 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 license key, and [federation](https://fluxer.com/blog/roadmap-2026.md), [encrypted calls](https://fluxer.com/blog/roadmap-2026.md) and [encrypted DMs](https://fluxer.com/blog/roadmap-2026.md) are on our roadmap. Fluxer has [no venture capital or outside investors](https://fluxer.com/help/is-fluxer-funded-by-venture-capital.md), and the people who use and support Fluxer fund it. [Plutonium](https://fluxer.com/help/how-does-fluxer-make-money.md) 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](https://fluxer.com/help/discord-bots-on-fluxer.md) 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](https://fluxer.com/blog/how-i-built-fluxer.md), a longer post on our blog. ## Questions people ask Each of these short articles has the answer to one question about Fluxer's history. - [When was Fluxer created?](https://fluxer.com/help/when-was-fluxer-created.md) - [Why haven't I heard of Fluxer before?](https://fluxer.com/help/why-havent-i-heard-of-fluxer.md) - [How many people use Fluxer?](https://fluxer.com/help/how-many-people-use-fluxer.md) - [Is Fluxer on iOS, the App Store and Google Play?](https://fluxer.com/help/fluxer-app-store.md) - [Is Fluxer dead? Will Fluxer shut down?](https://fluxer.com/help/is-fluxer-dead.md) --- Canonical page: https://fluxer.com/help/story-of-fluxer Last updated on November 1, 2026