Franz 6, and the end of an exception

If you have been using Franz for years, the way Franz 6 treats your account has probably changed. That can be frustrating, especially if Franz has simply been part of your desktop for a long time.

I want to walk through how I got here, what is actually changing, and what your options are. This is not a marketing piece. It is the honest version of a trade-off that has existed inside Franz for years, and that Franz 6 finally makes visible.

A short history of Franz

Franz launched on Product Hunt in March 2016. In the beginning there was no account system. You downloaded the app, added your services, and used it. Accounts came later, in 2018, after Franz had already grown through word of mouth into one of the more popular multi-service messaging apps.

That history matters, because many early users have been around longer than their Franz account suggests. Franz 5 shipped about seven years ago, with paid plans built in from the start. Over the years, every time I introduced a new free-tier limit, I kept long-time free users outside that change.

That was deliberate. It was a repeated choice, and a real expression of gratitude for the people who showed up early, talked about Franz, and helped make the product visible when it was still very small.

It also created an exception. Long-time free users lived under terms that newer free users never had. That exception lasted a long time.

If you want the longer version of how Franz got here, I wrote about it in Ten Years of Franz.

The economics nobody sees

Franz looks simple from the outside because that is the point. One window. Many services. Less jumping around. Underneath that, Franz is a constant maintenance job.

There are update channels to keep running, infrastructure to operate, builds to sign, support systems to maintain, and service recipes for dozens of web apps that keep changing underneath Franz. Slack or WhatsApp changes how unread badges can be detected. Gmail adds new login security restrictions for @gmail.com accounts. Microsoft Teams gets stuck in an endless login loop. Franz has to keep up with all of that.

There are also support emails, including the ones that get answered on Sunday afternoons because that is when someone finally has time to fix their setup before Monday morning.

Franz today is one person at the keyboard. That is not a downsizing story, and it is not a sad story. It is the shape I chose because it removes the pressure to chase quarterly metrics, enterprise detours, and features I do not believe in. I wrote more about that choice in Ten Years of Franz.

The default story with free software is that if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. In practice that often means data sales, behavioral advertising, attention monetization, dark patterns, or a slow drift toward whatever makes the free user base more extractable.

Franz never wanted to be that, and never has been. Franz has never sold user data. Not historically, not now. At points in Franz history, some newer free users saw modest, unobtrusive ads on the waiting screen. Nothing invasive, nothing tracking-based, and not something the long-time free users now writing in about Franz 6 would have encountered.

But if Franz does not run on data sales, and does not run on turning attention into an advertising product, then the conclusion is fairly plain: the only meaningful way Franz stays alive is people who choose to pay for it.

Franz 6, built coming back

Franz 6 is not a refresh of Franz 5. It is a ground-up rebuild of the product, the app shell, and the future I want Franz to have. Franz 5 carried the product for years, but the next decade needed a stronger foundation.

Franz 6 is also the version I built while coming back from a serious accident in early 2025. The work was harder than any release before it. The fuller story is in Ten Years of Franz, and I do not want to re-narrate it here.

What matters here is the sustainability question. If Franz 6 is the foundation for the next chapter, the plan structure has to be sustainable from the start. I went back and forth on this for a long time, because I knew it would disappoint some early users. In the end, I decided that every user on Franz 6 needs to be on the same plan structure.

The exception does not carry forward into Franz 6.

What is actually changing

Free tier limits now apply to everyone on Franz 6. That is the change. Long-time free users who were previously grandfathered into older terms now share the same Franz 6 free plan as everyone else.

Nobody is being downgraded by force. Franz 5 still exists, is still distributed, and still receives service recipe updates. When I update a recipe for Franz 6, the same update flows to Franz 5. The auto-updater does not silently replace Franz 5 with Franz 6, and moving to Franz 6 is an active install you choose to do. You may see in-app messages letting you know Franz 6 is available, sometimes with a discount, but that is promotion, not migration. No data, accounts, or settings are lost when you do upgrade.

Franz 5 has a real trade-off. The service recipes on Franz 5 do not simply rot, but the underlying Chromium engine is frozen. That means no more security patches and no newer web platform features. Over time, some services may stop loading when they require a modern browser engine. Franz 5 is a real option for the foreseeable future. It is not a trap or a punishment. But it has a slow expiration date.

What you can do

There are three honest options.

You can stay on Franz 5. It still works, receives service recipe updates, and is not being removed on any announced timeline. The trade-off is the aging browser engine underneath it.

You can move to the Franz 6 free tier. It is more limited than the old grandfathered free setup, but it is actively maintained, improving, and built on the foundation Franz needs from here forward.

You can upgrade to a paid plan on Franz 6. That funds development, infrastructure, recipe maintenance, and the support emails that still get answered on Sundays.

The lifetime plan is currently €149, down from €169. If Franz has been useful for the past decade and remains useful for another one, that works out to roughly 62 cents a month.

Thank you, and what comes next

If you have used Franz for years, thank you. Early users helped Franz grow through word of mouth, support, bug reports, patience, and the quiet credibility that comes from staying on someone's desktop for a very long time.

The exception lasted as long as it did because that early support mattered. Ending it is not a rejection of that history. It is recognition that the next decade of Franz needs a different shape to stay alive.

Franz 6 makes that next decade possible: native email, the async layer, private intelligence, and a product that can keep getting deeper without turning into something I would not want to use.

Stefan