I'm Stefan. I've been building Franz in Vienna since 2016.
Franz puts your messengers, your email and Signal in one desktop window. I started it as a weekend prototype 10 years ago, and I still build it myself, for the same reasons.
- Since 2016
- Vienna, Austria
- 1,000,000+ downloads
- Desktop App of the Year 2016
Stefan Schett-Malzner
Founder of Franz
Built in Vienna, Austria
Identity
Who's behind Franz
Franz is made by adlk x franz, my one-person company in Vienna, Austria. My name is Stefan Schett-Malzner (I published as Stefan Malzner until 2026).
Franz runs under Austrian law and the GDPR. The person who answers your support email is the one who wrote the code.
- Contact
- Press contact
- Legal notice
- Privacy policy
- Data processing agreement
- Subprocessors
- GitHub
Franz passed Google's CASA Tier 2 security assessment in 2026, carried out by TAC Security and repeated every year. How Franz is secured
Timeline
On the record
- March 2016 Franz launches on Product Hunt after a weekend prototype. #2 Product of the Day.
- Late 2016 Product Hunt Golden Kitty Award, Desktop App of the Year, with around 2,000 votes.
- 2018 Franz 5 ships with paid plans built in from the start. Its code was published as open source.
- 2020 Workspaces. Work and personal chat finally stay apart.
- 2022 Franz Todos. Capture follow-ups without leaving the inbox.
- 2026 Franz 6: native email, on-device AI, EU-hosted Cloud.
- 2026 Releases shipped so far: 27. Latest: 6.10.0 on October 21, 2026.
Covered at launch, 2016
Three decisions
How Franz stays independent
Three decisions, each the obvious move at the time. None of them would have made Franz better for the people using it.
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Funded by customers, not investors
In 2016 I spent months in fundraising talks. The term sheets didn't fit, my son was born, and the product sat still. So I stopped, and a few hundred users funded half a year of work in one afternoon when I asked. Since then the roadmap follows what you need, not what moves a metric next quarter.
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Priced simply, on purpose
Pay monthly, yearly, or once for life. Enterprise deals kept landing in my inbox and I said no, as per-seat pricing changes how a product gets built. We'll email you before any renewal.
See pricing -
Built by one person, deliberately
Franz once had a team of five. Now it's me again, and that's a choice. It also raises a fair question: what if something happens to me? Nothing is locked in Franz. Your messengers stay with their vendors and your email stays with your provider. Your local data is on your machine. Cloud features run in the EU under a data processing agreement you can read. And an installed Franz keeps working with your plan even when our servers can't be reached.
Read the full story
One more thing you should know. Franz 5 was open source. Forks took the code, removed the parts that pay for the work, and shipped them. That's why Franz 6 isn't open source. I'd rather tell you that than pretend it never happened.
Built in Vienna
Your work stays yours. Built in the EU, where we take this seriously.
Privacy is the default in Franz. Your inbox lives on your machine. On-device AI handles classification, drafting, and search without anything leaving your laptop. Pick Max and requests run on Franz-managed infrastructure in Europe. We don't train on your content or keep it beyond the answer. Bring your own provider key, and your request never touches a Franz server.
Customer voices
Still happy, years later.
I've been using Franz for ~10 years, and it's been an absolute game changer. When the 6.0 update broke on my machine, I messaged the developer and got sent a personal hotfix. Looking forward to another 10 years!
One of the very few products on my laptop that I can say I've been using for 10 years. (How many products can you say that about?) I've used it on Mac, Windows and Linux, and it delivers the same performance across every platform.
I first signed up for Franz back in 2019. I recently came back and was impressed by how much it had evolved: it's grown from a messaging aggregator into a true communication hub.
The name
Why "Franz"
I was tired of made-up startup names, so I'd started naming products after people I knew. Franz was my grandfather's name.
There's a wink at Franz Joseph in there too: if you're running an empire, you should probably get your communication under control first.
Running Franz
What you should know.
- Most of what I've tried since 2016 never shipped. Probably 80% of it.
- I won't promise enterprise SLAs or a five-person account team. Franz isn't built that way.
Ready to take control?
Try Franz free. It's on your machine in under two minutes.