cat donate/what-this-is
hqchat is a post-quantum end-to-end encrypted messenger for iOS and macOS. I built it to find out whether I could — an entire messaging stack, from the KEM up: the handshake, the ratchet, the broker authorization, the infrastructure, the apps. It is a demonstration of what I can build, and it is also a real product that really works, which is the only kind of demonstration worth anything.
This is not a hybrid. There is no X25519 underneath and no ML-KEM folded in beside it. Nearly every post-quantum deployment ships hybrid so that breaking the newer algorithm still leaves a classical one standing. hqchat has no such fallback: key agreement is HQC-256 and nothing else.
If HQC falls, the message layer falls. That is the bet, stated plainly, because a project that would not print its own worst sentence has not earned the rest of the page.
No ads. No trackers. No analytics. No contact uploads. No investors to eventually answer to. There is no data here to sell and no intention of acquiring any — which rules out every business model a messenger normally has.
That is the whole reason for this page. Anything else that could pay the bill would compromise the thing being paid for.
cat donate/what-it-costs
Roughly fixed, every month, whether five people use it or five thousand. Users cost capacity rather than money, which is why the product is free rather than metered — and why the honest ask is for help with a standing bill rather than a price per head.
| DigitalOcean droplet — production, London | $18 |
| DigitalOcean droplet — pre-prod | $18 |
| DigitalOcean Managed Postgres (single node) | $15 |
| Apple Developer Program ($99/yr) | $8 |
| Domain | $1 |
| Cloudflare — DNS, the Worker serving this page, R2 | $0 |
| Sentry — crash reporting | $0 |
about $60 a month. Approximate and rounded: an exact figure here would be stale within a billing cycle and worse for being wrong. It does not count the time, which is the largest cost and is not for sale.
cat donate/the-ask
monthly at €2, €5, €15, or €10 once. no account, no form here, nothing to fill in on this site — stripe takes it from the button onward.
If you would rather have the software than fund it, take the software: the app and the server are both published, and the server is AGPL-3.0. Run your own.
stripe asks for an optional name at checkout. leave it blank and nothing at all is recorded here; fill it in and it appears on the supporters page, stored on its own with nothing to join it to.
free, for iPhone and iPad, iOS 18.5 or later. every feature is in it and there is nothing to buy anywhere inside it. the App Store listing is the iOS app; the macOS build is not on the store.