stoat.exposed
The Ltd
No board to please. One shareholder to file.
The homepage talks like a co-op. Companies House talks like a private limited company. This page is the money file: what they collect, what they promised to show you, and what is actually public. A second pass looked for donations spent on a good time. The public record does not show that. The charge is that you cannot see where the coffee went.
SOON™
The sentence on the FAQ
Stoat is entirely funded through donations, we have amassed a significant amount of money from donations alone. (financial transparency reports coming soon ™️) developers.stoat.chat/faq, last update 10 May 2024, written from “the perspective of the project owner”
Sixteen-plus months later the ™️ is still the report. The same paragraph says month-to-month income covers operations “and leaves enough spare to cover yearly expenses and the occassional one-time expense, such as for additional hardware.” August 2026: an extra US node went up on the 9th and came down on the 22nd “due to the great associated costs.” Spare, in this dialect, is a feeling.
Two coffee pages
For years, people who wanted to fund the chat app tipped ko-fi.com/insertish, Paul Makles’s personal page: “Building Stoat chat and other cool stuff.” Around August 2026 he posted that it was “long overdue” to split Stoat onto ko-fi.com/stoatchat. Personal page, going forward: “Future donations here will just fuel my development costs.” Project page: “Help support our running costs.”
Approximate public counters at research time: personal page ~650 supporters and ~3,764 coffees received; project page ~1,032 supporters and ~3,294 coffees received. Ko-fi is not Open Collective. There is no public expense list, no invoices, no salary line. Large gifts: “if you want to make a larger donation, please consult me first.”
A second research pass looked for the other story: donations spent on a good time, jets, rentals, creator-merch receipts. Nothing like that is in the public record for this project. (The Coffeezilla “Revolt” merch company is a different Revolt.) Mixing a personal tip jar with platform running costs for years, then labeling the split overdue, is the documentable fact. Opacity is the product defect.
On the people who build the clients: Insert wrote, 24 January 2024, that team conduct is “not a strict requirement and certainly not enforced as everything is on a volunteer basis.” The FAQ says donations cover operational costs and leave “enough spare” for hardware. The founder has a paid FUTO/Immich job. There is no public Stoat payroll, and there is no public vacation ledger either. The gap is the missing books, not a proven theft.
Vale inquiry, archived · FAQ · Helping Stoat
Revolt Platforms Ltd
| Field | Filing | Homepage copy |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Revolt Platforms Ltd, 16260658 | Stoat. The animal, the mission, the mascot Toast. |
| Incorporated | 18 February 2025 | Passion project, 2021, no executives or shareholders. |
| Control | Pawel Makles, 75% or more of shares, sole PSC | “Answers to you, not investors.” “No board to please.” |
| Office | 60 Tottenham Court Road, Suite 5703a, then a Hatton Garden suite before that | Built in Europe, under the strictest laws. |
| Accounts | First accounts due 18 November 2026, not submitted at research time | Transparency reports coming soon ™️ (May 2024) |
| Day job | GitHub: “i currently work @ FUTO on the Immich team” | Every decision starts and ends with the people using the software. |
The privacy policy names this company as the data controller. The domain registrant is the same Ltd. FUTO is also the source-first license family used for some of the non-OSI components. A paid seat there does not make Stoat a FUTO product. It does make “no board to please” a line that needs a footnote.
The monetisation already on paper
FAQ: “We have monetisation plans lined up for the future, however it is not our intention to paywall existing features, instead where possible we intend to pass down costs such as for file storage or voice bandwidth.” Homepage, same era of marketing: “Don’t pay for basic stuff.” Passing through bandwidth is how you start charging for voice without calling it Nitro. The intention is written down. The ™️ is the audit.