Product autopsy · Stoat / Revolt / Toast
Stoat sells independence, privacy, and a Discord you can trust. The live homepage on stoat.chat still promises no data mining, no investors, iOS, and FOSS forever. The FAQ has promised financial transparency reports since May 2024, with a trademark on “coming soon.”
C&D
What this site is
Stoat is a Rust-backed, Discord-shaped chat platform by Pawel Makles (Insert). It launched as Revolt in 2021, hit the Hacker News front page, collected Discord refugees, and rebranded in October 2025 after a cease and desist. The software is real. The user influx is real. The autopsy is the copy.
The marketing site says no ads, no data mining, no board to please, every line of code public, and a client for every device you own. The privacy policy stores your messages, your IP, and your date of birth. The GitHub org still marks iOS as not ready. Discover spent years off the public forge. Donations lived on a personal Ko-fi until a “long overdue” split.
This page is the product they described, written in English, with the claims checked against the repos, the legal entity, and the public record. Research current as of September 2026.
Their specials, translated
Private
Homepage: “Not sketchy, not creepy.” Users on GitHub asked them to stop saying “Secure and Confidential” because messages sit in MongoDB in plaintext. E2EE has been “after video chats” since 2023. The privacy supplement collects date of birth, every message, IP, and a device fingerprint, then forwards login behavior to hCaptcha in Delaware.
Independent
“We’ve got no board to please.” Revolt Platforms Ltd, company 16260658, one person with 75% or more of the shares. Registered office is a London virtual-office suite. The founder’s GitHub bio also lists a paid job at FUTO on Immich.
FOSS
About page: “Every line of code is public.” “100% Open source.” Discover and Shield were kept off a libre license. The new admin panel still has an open AGPL-violation issue. Auxiliary source lived on an unlinked GitLab and an inaccessible internal forge.
Scale
February 2026: “There’s simply too many people, but we’re trying our best.” Sign-up mail hit spam lists. August 2026: an extra US node went up on the 9th and came down on the 22nd because of cost, two weeks after a Brazilian influx.
Everywhere
iOS is TestFlight, iOS 18 or later, “not yet ready for production.” macOS ships with a documented “is damaged and can’t be opened” workaround. Linux is “currently in the process of publishing to Flathub.” Official clients mostly refuse custom instance URLs.
Free
Custom emoji and 20MB uploads are free today. The FAQ, last updated May 2024, already has monetisation “lined up” for file storage and voice bandwidth. Large donations: consult Insert first. The books: coming soon, with a ™️.
Exhibit A
1 October 2025: the blog sold a personality refresh. 3 October 2025: Insert added that they received a cease and desist over the name Revolt, would not name the sender, and would write a postmortem “within the next week.” Temporary brand assets were “hastily created.” The new LiveKit voice stack launched in the same push and was not usable in production.
I apologise for the way this ended up being handled, we will do better in the future. Insert, 3 October 2025, on the rebrand post
Users thought the redirect was a hack. The placeholder tagline, “a chat where you are the main character,” got compared to a protein powder ad. Maintainers locked the thread after saying the line would be retired. Names they considered first included Furor, Schism, Vulp, Glowbug, and Pipit.
The founder
Pawel Makles writes as “we” on the landing page and as “I” on the FAQ. He is the data controller, the person of significant control, and the person you email if you want to give a large donation. For years the coffee page was personal: “Building Stoat chat and other cool stuff.” The project page arrived later, labeled “long overdue.”
There is no public record of jets, mansions, or a merch-company binge. There is also no public ledger. The FAQ still says they “amassed a significant amount of money from donations alone.” The US node still got pulled for cost.
If you would not hand a community to a 23-year-old whose homepage denies having a board while Companies House lists him as the board, you already understand the product.
Start here
01
Every major sentence on stoat.chat, set next to the files.
02
The CLA, the closed drawers, the AGPL they could not enforce.
03
Revolt Platforms Ltd, two Ko-fis, coming soon™.
04
Insert, the co-founders who left, the postmortem that was due last week.
05
Links to the live pages, repos, filings, and threads used here.
stoat.exposed