# About Phlip started from two observations. First: group chats are where plans go to die — the enthusiasm is real, but it scrolls away. Second: almost every group's social life is hosted on some company's servers, when a perfectly good computer is sitting in your pocket (and probably another in a drawer). Phlip answers both at once: an **events-first** app where plans are pitched as cards and locked in with live RSVPs — hosted on **an Android phone your group actually owns**. ## Why a phone as the server? Big platforms make you trade ownership for convenience. Federated self-hosting (Matrix, XMPP) restores ownership but assumes a VPS and a sysadmin's patience. True peer-to-peer fights the operating systems themselves — mobile OSes kill background connections, and NAT makes "connect to my phone" harder than it sounds. Phlip takes the pragmatic path: **one designated host** on a phone. A phone is always on, has a battery (a built-in UPS), and its owner already knows how to look after it. A recycled spare in a drawer is the purist's setup; your daily phone works too. For friends far away, the app opens a Cloudflare Tunnel — traffic is relayed, but the data lives only on the host. ## The principles 1. **Events first.** Chat exists to support plans, not the other way round. 2. **Own the hardware, own the community.** No company servers holding your group's content. 3. **Do one thing well.** Phlip plans events; it doesn't try to be your group's everything. Keep chatting wherever you like — Phlip is for turning talk into plans. 4. **Members need almost nothing.** The app or a browser, a join code, a name, and their own password. 5. **Honesty about boundaries.** What's encrypted, what isn't yet, what's shipped versus planned — stated plainly ([[FAQs]], [[Roadmap]]). 6. **Free means free.** Open source (Apache-2.0), no feature paywalls — supporter purchases are cosmetics only. ## The name You **pitch** a **plan** — a card thrown onto the group's timeline — and people commit to it in real time. The software's whole job is getting plans from "someone should organise this" to a card with names on it. And it runs on the phone that was sitting in your drawer. --- **Quicklinks:** [[Home]] · [[Features]] · [[FAQs]] · [[Roadmap]]