Kloak’s About page is written as “we.” Google Play, Hacker News, and X name a person. The privacy app is one launch in a stack of launches.
Google Play, developer section of Kloak - Communities & Chat:
Hacker News account lakshikag, created 12 January 2025, posted the Kloak Show HN and later dropped Kloak links into a “Discord Alternatives, Ranked” thread twice in the same discussion. X account @lakshikagayal uses the same given name and points at ItsLaunched, “a fair Product Hunt alternative.”
AlternativeTo listed the developer as “Jim.” A comment on an official Kloak video (What are media channels?) said: “Some AI tooling was used in the early days, but that was when it was just Jim working on it. Now there is a bunch of devs and security engineers volunteering… It’s human code.” Reddit user u/RandomDudeSL, posting as staff on r/discordsucks, wrote “I work on it, yes but not the founder.”
About still says “a team of roughly five.” The first Show HN said “two of us.” Join Us is a 23-seat volunteer board. The terms say there is no company. Play Store says there is a studio. All of those sentences were live at the same time.
Kloak About: “No promotion. No marketing campaigns. No launch events.” The same HN account, in public, Show-HN’d or launched:
| Product | Pitch |
|---|---|
| berrylog.app | Analytics. “The very first thing I do when starting a new project is add analytics.” |
| bugdrop.app | In-page bug reports. X post: 150+ users, $105 in revenue two days after launch. |
| itslaunched.com | Product Hunt alternative for indie makers. Repeated Show HNs. |
| kibun.social | Status board on AT Protocol. Kloak’s CSP still includes livekit.kibun.social. |
| nooki.me | Minimal Reddit-style discussion. |
| buzzed.chat | Yahoo Messenger-inspired web chat. Another chat app. |
| sayallo.xyz | Ello clone. Show HN: “my name is Lakshika.” |
| threadsky.app | Reddit-style Bluesky client. |
| blueskypolls.xyz | Polls for Bluesky. |
| daynote.club | Shared daily journaling prompt. |
| kloak.app | Privacy-first Discord alternative. Closed source. Spare time. |
The list is the context for “we did not want attention” and “community-driven passion project.” Kloak arrived the way the rest arrived: a Show HN, a promo video, a subreddit, a membership page.
Show HN: Berrylog, 1 September 2025, lakshikag:
The very first thing I do when starting a new project is add analytics. I want to know if anyone is actually using it and how.
Kloak FAQ, months later: “we also collect zero analytics, tracking pixels, or behavioral data.” Cookie policy: “Here’s our secret: we talk to our users. … We use aggregate, anonymized server metrics to know if the service is working.” The same person ships an analytics SaaS and a chat app whose selling point is the absence of analytics.
On that Berrylog thread, a commenter wrote: “I just wish you wouldn't write all your texts with an LLM.” The Kloak legal pages read like the same generator: “Privacy isn’t a feature, it’s the architecture” appears on privacy, cookies, and terms. Join Us asks new engineers to be comfortable with Lovable. Lovable is an AI app builder.
We can verify, without an account:
Closed source plus an AI-builder comfort requirement plus “we will open source once it is clean” is a pattern. You are asked to donate to a binary you cannot read, written by a team that advertises AI tooling in the job spec.
About: self-funded plus donations, no VC, no valuations, no subscriptions. YouTube: “Kloak started out as a side-project, so we could totally handle funding it ourselves. But we have recently opened up donations too.” Buy Me a Coffee: 42 supporters, paid memberships up to $45/month, badges that look like Nitro with the serial numbers filed off. The client bundle even has a nitro-badge asset. Titan sells “Lifetime of free, paid features” while the FAQ still talks about paid upgrades in the future tense.
Terms: “We don’t generate revenue.” Recurring memberships are revenue. The processor is Buy Me a Coffee, not a shoebox.
A closed-source Discord clone, messages staff can read, login is a string in Local Storage, no company in the terms, a studio on the Play Store, a founder whose other product is analytics, a Join page that wants Lovable, and a recovery story that reversed itself in public. If you would hand that person your group chat because the landing page said “we were tired of being the product,” you already read the product they built.