The story

Two dads, one locked garden, and a fortnight.

A kid who couldn’t message their friends

Eleven started because Paul’s kid wanted to chat with their friends, and there was no good way to do it. Their friends’ families had every kind of device, and Messages only really works if everyone buys Apple. The other apps wanted a phone number, an account, an age they didn’t have, or a data trade no parent should sign a child up for.

Sending a few words to people you already know is the simplest thing computers do. Every mainstream option gates it behind a device brand, an identity, or an advertising business.

Two dads, same wall

Paul mentioned it to James, whose kids are younger and heading for the same wall. It resonated. Both of us have spent decades building software for the web, and both of us have watched the industry drift somewhere neither of us wants our kids to live: feeds engineered for compulsion, identities harvested by default, and a vast amount of hardware and electricity keeping it all lit.

A better version is possible. Not a slogan: an app you can download today.

The inefficient factory

The bet: AI is an expensive, energy-hungry factory — and like any factory, what matters is what comes out of it. A factory that builds solar panels earns its keep. So we pointed the inefficient factory at building ruthlessly efficient software: a messenger that’s small, fast, private, and costs almost nothing to run.

That’s the Eleven model. Big tech never built this app because respecting people doesn’t feed an advertising business, and a hand-built version wouldn’t have been affordable. Built this way, it is. The same idea is written up more formally in The Eleven Factors.

Owned by humanity

Building this way raises an obvious question: if AI wrote many of the lines, who should own them? Generative AI is trained on the combined knowledge of all of humanity — everything it produces is distilled from billions of people’s public work. Our answer is the GAI Licence (pronounced “gay”): the MIT Licence with one addition — whatever you derive from this software and pass on stays open, under the same licence, forever. The commons wrote it with us; when it moves on, it returns to the commons.

The licence also keeps authorship honest: AI-written material carries a little 🤖 marker, and nobody may pass AI text off as human-written. It follows Factor VI of the Eleven Factors — and yes, the licence itself was drafted by an AI, on the ideas, instruction, and editing of humans. It opens with a 🤖.

Built to outlive AI

Here’s the commitment hiding under all of it: everything we build is designed to outlive AI. The code stays manageable by humans alone — plain, readable, no exotic tooling — so if AI became unavailable or unaffordable tomorrow, people could carry this product on without it. Nothing about running Eleven depends on the factory that built it.

It cuts both ways. If AI disappears, Eleven survives. If high-capability AI keeps getting cheaper, we’re standing on a solid, human-legible baseline it can build from. Either way, your group chat doesn’t wobble with the fortunes of the AI industry.

Two weeks

In the first two weeks there was a working service, a web app, and native Mac and iPhone apps. Not mock-ups — the things you can get on the front page. Encryption wasn’t an add-on for later; it was there from the first message. And the way Eleven runs makes it potentially around thirty times more carbon-friendly than the way apps like this are usually built — the sums are on the planet page.

The ambition is bigger than a family group chat: this design should scale to billions of people without the experience getting worse for any one of them, because every group lives in its own small, private space rather than one giant shared system. It starts where it started: a kid who wanted to message their friends.

A co-op, not a corp

We don’t want to build another company whose destiny is to be sold, and whose members are its inventory. Our intent is for Eleven to become a co-operative — owned by the people who use and run it, with open books and no exit. Until the paperwork exists, we act like it already does: see the openness charter.

Who we are

Paul Campbell and James Adam. Say hello: team@elevenmessenger.com.

And the name? That’s a whole page of its own.