Funding
The public hub, hub.openloungephone.app, is free, funded by donations — no paid plan, no
ads, no tracking. It will always be free to try the service, and it’s live at
hub.openloungephone.app.
$0 of the $150 monthly goal for October 2026
- $150 a month keeps the hub running for ~7,250 people.
- September 2026: $150 raised, goal met.
Based on $5/month for Cloudflare Workers Paid plus about $0.02 per active person per month. The count starts again each month.
Why it’s cheap
Section titled “Why it’s cheap”Most calls are peer to peer: the audio goes directly between the two people and never touches the hub. Only about 20 % of calls need Cloudflare’s relay (both people behind strict networks), at roughly $0.04 per 1,000 relayed minutes, and phones use Opus DTX so silence costs almost nothing. The rest is small: requests, Durable Objects that sleep when nobody is calling, database rows and voicemail storage. The full cost table is on the hub page.
A generous monthly fair-use allowance keeps the hub fair for everyone. It stops abuse; calls in progress are never cut off, and your own server has no allowance at all.
For full assurance, run your own
Section titled “For full assurance, run your own”The hub is the easy way in. For full security assurance, run your own server on your own domain — on your Cloudflare account or with Docker: your data, your keys, still federated with everyone.