The story of TEBHOS

Welcome to TEBHOS. This is our blog's first post — so let's start at the very beginning: why does this app exist?

Why would anyone write a chat app from scratch?

The short answer: the tools we used didn't belong to us.

There are platforms where we talked with our friends for hours every day, and they all do good work. But on all of them we felt the same thing: we were guests. The interface was translated from another language, the decisions were made on another continent, and we spent our days inside a "product" where the real product was us. For Turkish-speaking communities, chat should not be a feature whose translation catches up later; it should be the starting point.

So we sat down and made ourselves a promise: we would build the app we use to talk with our friends ourselves. From Türkiye, thinking in Turkish, selling no one to anyone.

That is how TEBHOS was born.

Turkish first

On TEBHOS, Turkish is not a translation file; it is the native language. The interface is written in Turkish first; support is given in Turkish; this help centre and the blog you are reading are written in Turkish. We didn't put "no whiff of translation — because it isn't one" on our home page for nothing.

We care about this choice, because chat is language itself. The jokes, the innuendo, that fine line between "kanka" and "hocam" — these should seep into the interface's language too.

What's under the hood?

A short tour for the technically curious (no exaggeration, only what's real):

Rust. Our entire API layer is written in Rust. The reason is not fashion; it is speed and safety. Getting more work out of the same hardware also shrinks the server bill for a single-developer project.
Erlang. The real-time side — the connection layer that makes your message land on the other end "instantly" — runs on Erlang. Erlang is the technology that has kept telephone exchanges standing for decades, the ancestor of the "many connections at once" business.
ScyllaDB. A growth-resilient database designed for messages, servers and profiles. So your chat history doesn't slow down as it grows.
LiveKit. Voice channels, calls and live stage rooms run over a WebRTC-based audio backbone; our server neighbours Türkiye and its latency is low.

None of this is visible to the user — and that is the definition of good infrastructure anyway: to be invisible, and simply work.

An honest answer to "why an alternative?"

We are not here to bad-mouth anyone; we learned a lot from products we used and loved. TEBHOS's claim is not "they are bad" — it is "here is what we promise":

We don't sell your data. TEBHOS has no ads, no ad trackers, no behavioural profiling. That is not a marketing line; it is a commitment written into our Privacy Policy.
Our revenue is transparent. What keeps TEBHOS running is TEBHOS Pro subscriptions and the shop — in other words, direct user support. You are the customer, not the advertiser.
We use the advantage of being small. When you report a bug, there are no stacked layers of management between the person who reads it and the person who wrote the app. Your feedback genuinely changes the roadmap.

Where are we today?

TEBHOS today is a platform with text channels, voice rooms, live stage rooms, screen sharing and rich profiles — running and improving every day. We have a Windows desktop app; everywhere else we run in the browser. We know our gaps and we don't hide them — you can find what's on the way in our roadmap post.

If you want to build a community, or you're just looking for a quiet place to sit and talk with your friends: opening an account is free. Come sit in the middle of the conversation.

See you on TEBHOS.