We can't read your messages.
That's the entire company.

Privacy is not a promise. It is a property of the mathematics underneath the software.

Every messaging app tells you it cares about your privacy. Almost all of them are telling the truth about their intentions and lying about their architecture — not because they mean to, but because intention is all a promise can ever be. A promise depends on the people who run the company today, the people who buy it tomorrow, and how either group responds the first time a government, an investor, or a quarterly target asks them to bend.

We wanted to build something that doesn't ask you to trust any of that.

Cipher generates your keys on your device. We never see them. Your identity is a recovery phrase only you hold — not a phone number, not an email, nothing a company or a court can use to reach behind the encryption. If our servers were seized tomorrow, the people holding them would find only ciphertext: mathematically meaningless without keys that exist on exactly one device in the world. Yours.

We cannot read your messages. Not because we won't — because we can't. That distinction is the entire company.

This costs something, and we refuse to hide it. There is no password reset. If you lose your recovery phrase and your device at the same moment, your conversations are gone, and no one — not our support team, not our engineers, not a judge — can bring them back. That is the price of a guarantee no one can break. We would rather state it plainly, more than once, than sell you a softer version that isn't true.

We also refuse to overclaim. Cipher does not make you anonymous. It does not protect a phone that's already unlocked in someone else's hands. It does not stop someone you trust from betraying that trust. No software does these things, and any app that says otherwise is selling you a feeling instead of a fact. We will always tell you exactly where the math protects you and exactly where it can't.

We charge money because the alternative is to charge you in data, and we won't. A company that doesn't sell you needs another way to keep the lights on. Ours is simple: you pay us a fair price, and in exchange we never become the thing we were built to replace.

Use Cipher to live freely — to speak with your family, your friends, your sources, your doctor, your own private thoughts — without an invisible third party in the room. Use it responsibly. Use it to live freely, not to harm.

Privacy isn't a feature we added. It's the property the whole thing is made of.

— The Cipher team