How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app
SMRTR summary
Twenty-two-year-old Swedish developer Hampus Kraft has spent five years building what he calls "one of the closest public attempts at feature parity" with Discord - a free, open-source alternative called Fluxer. The computer engineering student from KTH Royal Institute of Technology launched his platform targeting users frustrated with proprietary chat services, offering both self-hosting capabilities and a European-hosted option.
Kraft's obsession began during the pandemic when he dove deep into Discord's architecture, eventually earning bug bounty rewards totaling $3,500 for security vulnerabilities he discovered. His technical stack mirrors Discord's approach, using battle-tested technologies like Cassandra for data storage and Erlang for real-time messaging - the same language powering WhatsApp's billions of users.
The bootstrapped project operates on a freemium model with optional Plutonium subscriptions and one-time "Visionary" packages at $299. Kraft deliberately avoids venture capital, running his Swedish company from a server in Virginia to balance European and US latency.
Despite launching publicly in early 2026, Kraft admits the revenue isn't quite enough yet to pay himself a proper salary in Sweden's high-tax environment, but remains committed to building what he sees as the technical community's missing piece.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to lobste.rs.
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