Franz 6, and the end of an exception.

A note from the founder.

Two and a half weeks ago I pressed the big red launch button on Franz 6 and said nothing about it.

When you rebuild a product from the ground up, a quiet launch is a courtesy you owe yourself. You watch the logs. You watch the support inbox. You wait to see what catches fire. In this case, almost nothing did. Four updates, six hundred and thirty-seven commits, and a respectable amount of bug squashing later, Franz 6 is steady on its feet. The next larger release is days away.

After a rough 2025 I am genuinely grateful to be shipping again, on a product I use every day and depend on more than I should admit. The emails since launch, many of them from people who have been with Franz for the better part of a decade, are the part of the job I will never get tired of.

This is the first issue of The Franz Telegraph. Bi-weekly. From the workshop. Expect personal notes from the build, product news with the work shown, occasional nonsense from the imperial messaging service, and the kind of detail that does not fit anywhere else.

This is dispatch one. There will be more. STOP

Franz 6, and the end of an exception.

Not all of the post-launch mail has been cheerful. The complaint is consistent and not unreasonable: long-time free users have been treated differently from new free users for years, and Franz 6 ends that.

I wrote a piece on the blog explaining how the exception came to exist, why I held it for nearly a decade, and why I finally stopped.

It is the most honest post I have written about how Franz pays for itself.

On the workbench.

• Linux is returning in the next release. Franz 5 ran on Linux for years. Franz 6 shipped without it, on purpose, to get the rebuild stable on two platforms first. The Linux mail has been loud, fair, and frequent, and I read every line of it. The wait is almost over. Days now, not weeks.
• A support tool that became a product. The tool I quietly built to triage my own support mail. It reads, sorts, drafts, and hands me the next thing to look at. It got good enough that I stopped wanting to live without it. Soon it will be its own product. More on this in a future dispatch.

If Franz saves you ten minutes a day, tell a friend. If it doesn't, tell me why.

— Stefan, founder of Franz