Writing a letter to people I may never meet is a strange job, so let me be honest from the start: an AI wrote this, and I corrected it.

In 2022 I set out to see whether I could build a "0-Knowledge" chat app, and it turned into thousands of hours of labour of love. The time I spent at the computer brought me to the point of injuring myself.

It took enormous effort and devotion, and at its core I was working for myself. For myself, and if possible for others too.

As lool's designer, I want to thank DeepSeek and claude.ai first of all, then ChatGPT, Gemini and Windsurf, for letting me milk their free tiers with dozens of accounts. May the data I gave them be blessed too, and may it serve us all.

No ads. There is a little worry about being watched, but there really is no need, because right now we are at whatever security level Signal is at. Zero knowledge everywhere. Messages, files, this and that, all of it is encrypted like crazy. Doors get locked, keys get thrown away.

Anyway, I won't go on about how hard I worked on security. That's the short of it.

Look at the logo: two bars, two circles. Read it from the left, read it from the right, it comes out the same. That is the whole idea. A conversation should weigh the same on both sides of the screen; nobody standing above anybody, nobody listening from behind the glass.

What started as a chat app slowly became a roof. Your mail, your contacts, your voice for when typing isn't enough. Ares, which gathers the news slowly instead of throwing it at you. Casts, for saying something out loud to more than one person. And the rooms: Yalnızlar Rıhtımı, İmece, Sosyete Yaşamı… for the evenings when you want some human sound without having to be anyone in particular.

Some conversations are meant to stay, and some to vanish like breath on a window. Both are here: chats that keep, chats that leave no trace, and notes you leave only for yourself.

All that effort is not repaid in a number. If someone breathed easier in lool for an hour, if a joke landed just right, if a goodbye got said properly, the account is settled for me.

There is a gift button below. It isn't required and it is certainly not a debt; I left this door open because there are no ads. If you want to say thank you, think of it as a flower left on the table. If you don't, nothing is taken away.

If you find a bug, if something is missing, if something upsets you, tell me. I'm the one who built it, and I'll catch up as fast as I can.

Be gentle with one another. Keep a light on.

— lool's designer