Overview
thinge is a self-hostable team communication app built around always-on group voice. You join a voice channel and simply stay in it — like sharing a room with your team — instead of scheduling a call each time you want to talk. Text chat, presence, and everything else sit alongside the voice.
It is meant to run on your own server, so your conversations — including your customers' — stay on infrastructure you control.
Why it exists
Remote teams lose the ambient presence of a shared office. In most tools, voice is a scheduled event: someone starts a call, everyone joins, it ends. That friction kills the spontaneous "hey, quick question" that makes an office work, and it pushes every interaction into text, where each exchange carries a delay.
thinge takes the opposite approach: voice is the always-on primary channel. You are simply present in a channel and can talk without setting up a call; text is the asynchronous layer for links, decisions, and anything worth keeping. Most of the work has gone into the voice path — low latency, echo cancellation, reconnection — since that is the part that differs from text-first chat tools.
Two more things shape the product:
- Self-hosted, with EU data locality in mind. You run the server, so the data stays on infrastructure you control. There is no per-seat SaaS bill, and hosting in the EU gives you data locality by default — which matters once customer conversations are involved.
- Built with customer support in mind. The guiding requirement: when a customer writes, someone needs to know — even when the app is closed and the phone is in a pocket. Notifications reach mobile devices, so that case is covered.
What thinge does today
- Always-on group voice — WebRTC with a selective forwarding unit (SFU); join a channel and stay.
- Text chat with Markdown, emoji reactions, and image attachments.
- Replies and topics — reply inline; a back-and-forth becomes a named topic you can filter to, rename, or read grouped.
- Direct messages — private one-to-one conversations.
- Presence — see who is around and who is talking.
- Screen sharing — share a screen into a channel.
- Transcription — optional speech-to-text for voice.
- Notifications — web push to browsers and installed mobile apps, plus in-app sounds, for direct messages, @-mentions, and replies to your messages.
- Webhooks — let CI systems and automated agents post status into a channel.
- Runs anywhere you do — a desktop app for macOS and Linux, plus any modern browser (installable as a mobile app for notifications).
All of it runs on a single self-hosted server.
What is next
thinge is under active development. Near-term work: email (invites and missed message digests), security hardening for business use, a Slack bridge for mirroring customer conversations, and downloadable desktop builds.
Where to go next
- Concepts — the mental model: channels, voice, presence, and how thinge differs from Slack or Discord.
- Get the app — run thinge in a browser, install it on your phone, or use the desktop app.
- Self-hosting — stand up your own thinge server on a single box.
- Webhooks — post into a channel from CI and automated agents.