Flotilla
Knowledge Base

Is Flotilla Free?

Privacy, cost & account By Jon Staab 3 min read

Using Flotilla and joining communities is completely free; the only optional costs are hosting your own space or sending zaps, and this spells out the client-vs-hosting distinction.

Is Flotilla Free?

Part of our guide to running an online community you actually own.

Yes. Using Flotilla — on the web, as a PWA, on Android, or on iOS — is completely free, and so is joining and taking part in communities. There’s no subscription, no premium tier, and nothing in the app locked behind a payment.

Nothing you do as a member costs anything

Flotilla is a Nostr client: the app you use to read and post messages, not a service you rent access to. You sign in with a key you own rather than an account you create with a company, and that key works the same everywhere Nostr does — Flotilla doesn’t charge you to use it. If key-based identity is new to you, see Understanding Your Nostr Identity.

Concretely, none of the following ever costs anything in Flotilla:

  • Creating a Nostr identity or logging in
  • Joining a space or leaving one
  • Chatting in rooms, sending direct messages, or reacting to messages
  • Using threads, the calendar, classifieds, polls, or the library
  • Getting push notifications

Flotilla is also open source. The code is public, and if you’d rather not use the hosted web app, you can self-host the client yourself. Nothing rented stands between you and the app.

The only real costs are on the space-owner side

Money enters the picture in just one place: when you want to run your own space rather than join someone else’s. That’s separate from using Flotilla, because Flotilla doesn’t host anything — creating a space in the app sends you to a hosting choice, not to a relay Flotilla spins up for you. See Spaces and Rooms Explained for that mental model.

If you do want to host a space, you have two paths, and only one is a Coracle product:

  • Coracle Hosting — a managed option where you provision and pay for a relay, with a free tier for small communities and paid plans as you add members or want media and voice/video. See Hosting Your Space with Coracle for plan pricing and what each tier includes.
  • Self-hosting — the underlying relay software (zooid) is itself free and open source; you just pay for your own server to run it on. See Self Hosting a Space for a full walkthrough.

Either way, this cost belongs to whoever owns and runs the space, not to the people who join and chat in it. As a member, you never pay just because the space you joined happens to run on a paid plan somewhere.

Zaps are optional, never required

The one place you might choose to spend money inside Flotilla is zaps — small Lightning tips you can send on a message, a thread post, or a community fundraising goal. Zaps are entirely opt-in: nothing in Flotilla requires you to send or receive one, and plenty of people use the app for years without ever connecting a wallet. On iOS, zaps and the wallet are turned off entirely due to Apple’s App Store policy, so the option isn’t even present on that platform.

The bottom line

Using Flotilla to chat and be part of communities costs nothing, full stop. The only money that ever changes hands is optional, and it belongs to a different job entirely: an owner choosing to pay for hosting infrastructure (Coracle Hosting or their own server), or a member choosing to tip someone with a zap. If you’re just here to use the app, you’ll never be asked to pay for anything.