One-time license
Lifetime usage
E2EE chat & calls
Self-hosted
HIPAA & GLBA compliant
AI only if you want it
Per-user, per-month, forever — and the price goes up whenever the vendor feels like it.
Shack brings the sanity back: you buy a license per user, once, and you're done.
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The four promises Shack is built on
One-time license per user with lifetime usage. No renewals, no meters, no "we've updated our pricing" emails. Your cost is known on day one.
Shack runs on your own servers — messages, files and calls end-to-end encrypted. HIPAA- and GLBA-compliant by design: all data remains on your server and you control who has access. Nothing ever touches our infrastructure.
Until you need one. AI assistance ships switched off and stays off until an admin turns it on. Your conversations are never used to train anything.
Planning a bigger rollout? We work directly with partner organizations — volume licensing, deployment help and a direct line to the developers. Get in touch for further information.
1. A monthly subscription — Shack plus the infrastructure, run by us.
2. A one-time lifetime license per seat — bring your own cloud or server.
Same apps, same end-to-end encryption, same address either way:
yourcompany.shackchat.app.
A monthly subscription for Shack usage — we provide and run the servers, storage and backend. No IT team, no hardware, no patching: your organization is live at yourcompany.shackchat.app in minutes. And because Shack is end-to-end encrypted, we host ciphertext — your messages stay readable only inside your organization.
A one-time license per seat, forever — you run Shack on infrastructure you control: a cloud VPS, an office server, even a spare machine. You own the hardware, the data and the uptime; hosting costs whatever your server costs. No subscription, ever.
Option 1: subscribe monthly and we provide the infrastructure. Option 2: license once, for life, on your own cloud or server.
Live at yourcompany.shackchat.app in minutes — no server, no IT.
Subscription covers hosting & infrastructure — never the software
Pick your seat count at checkout — buy 5 or 5,000.
Secure checkout by Stripe · cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay
For larger rollouts and custom needs — contact us for further information.
* The one-time license covers each user for the version of Shack you purchase, for life. New features and future versions are optional and offered as per-license upgrades at an additional charge — your current version keeps working forever either way.
** "One-time purchase, no subscription" applies to the self-hosted option, where Shack runs on your own server. If you choose hosted space on Shack's servers instead, that hosting is billed as a subscription — the fee is for server space and infrastructure, never for the software itself. Full details in the License Terms.
Rolling Shack out to a large organization, or building something bigger on top of it? We work directly with a small number of partners. Reach out and tell us what you have in mind — we'll take it from there.
Install the app, type your organization ID — yourcompany.shackchat.app — and you're in.
iPhone, iPad and Android apps ship with your organization's onboarding email. Desktop downloads are direct from our servers — no store account needed.
Straight answers — fine print included, in plain English
You buy a license for a user once, and that user can use the version of Shack you purchased forever — no renewal, no subscription, no expiry. New features and future versions are optional, per-license upgrades; you're never forced to move. If you add people later, you just buy licenses for the new seats.
On your servers. Shack is self-hosted and end-to-end encrypted — messages, files and keys stay inside your infrastructure. We couldn't read your data even if we wanted to, because it never reaches us.
Yes — by architecture. All data remains on your server, end-to-end encrypted, and you control who has access. Nothing ever flows through our infrastructure, so the compliance boundary stays inside your organization — exactly what HIPAA and GLBA auditors want to see.
Not unless you turn one on. AI assistance is disabled by default and only an admin can enable it, when your team actually needs it. Your conversations are never used for training.
No — only per user. Run Shack on one box or a cluster, one workspace or many; the license simply counts the people using it.
Yes. The one-time, no-subscription pricing applies when Shack runs on your own server. If you'd rather not run infrastructure, we can host it for you on Shack's servers — the hosting is billed as a subscription that covers server space and infrastructure only. The software license itself stays one-time either way.
Checkout runs through Stripe. After payment you'll receive your license keys and activation instructions by email, typically within one business day.
Anytime. Buy more seats through the same checkout and your admin panel picks up the new count. Seat limits are enforced in the admin app so you always know where you stand.
Host it yourself and pay once — or let us run it while you keep the keys.