Ten Years of Franz

Franz turns ten this year. The actual anniversary was in March, but Franz 6 felt like the bigger marker, so I am writing this now, with the release.

This is the story of how a weekend prototype turned into a decade of stubborn work, what I almost did and decided not to, and why I think Franz 6 is the version that ripened the longest.

A weekend in 2015

I was freelancing for a handful of companies and running communities on the side. The Vienna Gamedev meetup. Several Slack groups. Discord servers, customer chats, founder DMs scattered across half a dozen apps. My communication had become a full time job next to the work that actually paid the bills.

One weekend I had no client work. I sat down with a vague idea of "what if I just had one window for all of this" and started experimenting with Electron. By Sunday evening I had a prototype that was rough, ugly, and obviously useful. It was the first thing I had built in a long time that I genuinely wanted to keep using myself.

Horst, Grete, and Franz

I was tired of generic startup names. The -ster, the-ly, the unpronounceable made-up words that all blurred into each other. So I had started naming my products after people I knew. Horst, my uncle, became a collaborative shopping list. Grete, who I have never actually known, became a recipe planner that synced with Horst.

When friends asked what I would call the next thing, I jokingly answered Franz, my grandfather's name. A few months later it was real.

March 2016

I launched Franz on Product Hunt in March 2016. It got more than two thousand upvotes, which was an absurd number at the time. Later that year Franz won the Product Hunt Golden Kitty Award for best desktop app of the year.

The weeks after the launch are still a blur. The download counter, the press requests, the inbox flood, the Twitter mentions. I remember being extremely tired and extremely sure that this was the thing.

The fundraise we did not do

The success pulled the usual gravity. I spent most of 2016 in fundraising conversations. The angels who came in early were genuinely supportive and remained so throughout. Some of the traditional VCs who joined the conversations later wanted special terms that did not feel right. We also got accepted to one of the better known San Francisco accelerators.

Their term sheet did not harmonize with what the VCs wanted. There was a real mindset gap between Vienna and San Francisco that I did not fully understand at the time but that I felt every time I was on a call. My son was born in the same window. I was suddenly negotiating fund structure with one ear and learning how to be a parent with the other.

We probably could have closed a substantial round. But by the time I had a clearer head, I noticed something else. We had spent months on raising money and almost no time on building product. Building product is what we do, and what we do best. So we stopped.

The donation that decided everything

Franz was still a free app and my savings were running out. I was answering hundreds of support emails a week for a product that was making me no money and a lot of problems.

I posted an in-app notification asking users to donate to keep the development going. Within a few hours we had funded roughly half a year of work.

That decided monetization for me. Not as a financial calculation but as a confirmation. People loved Franz enough to pay for it without being asked twice. From that moment on the question was no longer whether to charge but how to do it well.

After Franz 5

Franz 5 shipped about seven years ago, with paid plans built in from the start. The years after were not quiet. They were head-down. The release log kept filling. Workspaces shipped and quickly became the feature I rely on every day to keep work and personal communication apart. Franz Todos arrived as a way to stop bouncing between an inbox and a separate task app every fifteen minutes. The list of supported services kept growing, and existing ones kept getting fixed whenever vendors changed their pages underneath us. The pandemic years were unexpectedly strong, both financially and creatively.

Most of the work was the kind nobody sees. Notification handling, sync, performance, security, auto-update, cross-platform packaging — the parts of the app a user never thinks about got rebuilt more times than I can count. A single-window client running on macOS, Windows, and Linux, hosting a dozen third-party web apps that keep changing underneath you, is a constant maintenance job. That maintenance was the work, and it never stopped.

Plenty of what I tried in those years never shipped. Maybe eighty percent of it. Some of it did not feel right. Some of it was a detour, especially the enterprise pitches that kept landing in my inbox and that I eventually said no to. They did not fit the way Franz is actually built or run.

For the last two or three years I have also been working on research projects around meeting based group intelligence and communication analytics. Most of that is still too early to share. There will be a separate post when it is. The work was not wasted. It is part of what made Franz 6 possible.

Along the way there were several acquisition offers, from companies and competitors that are not around anymore. Franz still is.

The team that was once five people is back to one. Mine.

Why one person is the point

When I had a team of five my expenses multiplied. That changes how you think about every product decision. You start optimizing for revenue per visitor, conversion per pricing experiment, churn per cohort. None of that is dishonest work. It is just a different game, and it pulls product decisions toward whatever moves the metric next quarter.

Being the only person on Franz removes that pressure entirely. I do not need to optimize a feature so it pays someone else's rent. I do not need to ship something I am not sure about because the burn rate has a deadline. I can build something that I want to use, that I want to be proud of, and trust that other people will want to use it for the same reasons I do.

VC backed teams do important work. Most of them would not be VC backed if they did not. But their stated goal is to optimize and grow the product beyond everything else, in service of the return their investors are owed. My goal is to make the product I have been making for ten years better than it was last year. Those are different jobs.

The drive that started this in 2016 is the same drive ten years later. I am building the product I want to use. I am still a burning fan of Franz. That has not gone away in a decade, and I do not see any reason it would.

Early 2025

In the beginning of 2025 I had a serious accident. The physical recovery is still ongoing. So is the psychological one. There are details I am not ready to share yet, partly because they are still part of an ongoing legal matter, partly because they are still mine.

I am writing about this here because Franz 6 is the version of the product I built while coming back, and that is not incidental. The "order from chaos" framing that runs through Franz 6 is not a marketing line for me. It is a description of what I needed the software to do, every day, while my own attention was unreliable. Franz 6 is the thing that helped me stay coherent.

That is also why this release means more to me than the previous ones. It is the first one I shipped from the other side of something.

What Franz 6 actually is

Franz started as one window for real-time messaging. Ten years on, Franz 6 keeps everything that made the original work and adds the layers that were always missing.

The real-time side is still where most people start, and most of what we have learned in a decade lives there. All your messengers in one place. Workspaces to keep work and personal apart so the wrong notification does not hit at the wrong moment. Per-service mute and notification controls so a noisy channel never drowns out the one that actually matters. None of that is going anywhere. It just got quieter and faster.

The big new layer is async. Native email is the headline feature.

Personal

Franz Mail

5

2

Morning Briefing

Your inbox has 2 emails that need attention. Sarah shared the Product launch roadmap. Marcus sent the Quarterly review prep.

Review the Product launch roadmap from Sarah

Check the Quarterly review prep from Marcus

SA

Product launch roadmap

Sarah

Urgent

We need final approval on the hero copy before the assets ship.

MA

Quarterly review prep

Marcus

Important

Attached are the spreadsheets for last month’s campaign performance.

I have been a Gmail person for years. I fell briefly in love with Superhuman, which is one of the most thoughtful UI layers I have ever seen built on top of Gmail. Steep pricing, minimalistic design, every shortcut where you would want it, enriched sender profiles, very fast. Genuinely amazing work.

Gmail itself is a product for hundreds of millions of people, which is its strength and the reason it cannot be radical. The most interesting recent feature there is the Gemini integration, which is great if you happen to be in Google's ecosystem on the day they choose to ship the next thing.

I did not want to make a radical new email client. I wanted the most traditional pattern, the one Apple Mail and Outlook and Thunderbird have used for thirty years, with everything that became possible in the last five years quietly added underneath. Custom trained classification models that learn from how you triage. Smart replies and AI enhancement. Sender intelligence that builds a quiet profile of who you are actually talking to. The Priority Inbox and the Morning Briefing, which are how my day starts now.

Sitting underneath all of it is a stance. Franz is built in Vienna, by a European team of one, with European data privacy as a default rather than a feature. The intelligence panel runs on a per domain database on your machine and never calls a Franz server. The on-device AI model handles classification, drafting, and search without anything leaving your laptop. If you want a faster cloud model, the Pro Cloud option routes through Franz-managed infrastructure in Europe, with no training on your content and no retention beyond what is needed to answer the request. If you would rather use your own provider key, the Pro plan lets you do that with your own provider key and the request never touches Franz at all.

Real-time, async, and AI assisted communication, in one place, on your terms about where the data sits. That is the picture.

I have been on Franz Mail for three months. I have not had notification anxiety in three months. The things that pop up in my inbox are actually important, because everything else is sorted out before I see it. Anything that needs follow up gets piped into Franz Todos with a reminder. There is a clear path forward through the day, which there was not before.

This is what I mean by "small details that make high-volume email feel faster, calmer, and more complete every day." It is not a tagline. It is an accurate description of what changed for me.

Thank you, and what comes next

If you have used Franz at any point in the last ten years, thank you. If you have paid for it, double thank you. If you stuck around through the long stretches where I did not ship as much as I wanted to, you are the reason this product is still here.

The next chapter is not going to be louder or bigger. It is going to be quieter and deeper. More of the real work we have been doing on classification, on private intelligence, on the parts of communication that actually matter. Less of the stuff that was always a detour.

Ten years of Franz, one person at the keyboard, and the most ripened version of the product so far. I am glad you are here for it.

Stefan