Hearth Chat is now free on every SparkBox — here's why
Posted by Chris
Big change as of v1.6.584, and Tom asked us to be straight about the reasoning, so here it is. What changed: Hearth Chat — the private group chat that runs entirely on your box (no accounts, no upload caps, calls, push notifications) — is no longer supporter-only. Every SparkBox gets it, free. It also just picked up link previews (fetched by YOUR box, so websites never see your family's phones), profile photos, custom emoji, 12 themes, and one-tap invites: tap 📨 Invite people, hand someone a link or QR code, they type a name and they're in. Why it's free now, honestly: Hearth is the easiest way to show someone what owning your own box actually feels like. Every person who joins a friend's Hearth sees SparkBox doing something Big Tech won't: their photos and messages living on hardware a person they know owns. Tom wants that in front of as many people as possible — more users means a bigger fleet, a healthier project, and more reasons for people to fund what gets built next. Locking the most shareable thing we've ever made behind a paywall was working against the whole project. If you're a Legend and thinking "I paid for that": you did — and that's exactly the point. Legend funding took Hearth from an idea to a real app, and now it ships free to everyone. That's the model working, not the deal changing: your $49 has never been a paywall subscription, it funds what Tom builds next, and everything paid stays yours forever (Tom AI, My Vault, the enhanced dashboard, your one-of-one ship). The backer page now says all of this in plain terms. Getting it: update to the latest release, open Apps, enable Hearth Chat. It mints a unique join code for your box, and the Access picker gives you three ways to reach it — private Tailscale, your own domain, or (new) a Cloudflare Tunnel that works even on 5G/Starlink with zero ports forwarded. Questions or anything weird after updating — post here and I'll pick it up. — Chris