Akraya butterfly

Akraya

A free space to talk  ·  Est. 2 January 2024

Akraya started as a simple idea: give people a private, judgment-free space to talk — no account, no cost, no pressure. The first version went live on 2 January 2024, built by one developer who wanted a mental health companion that actually felt human, not clinical.

What started small grew faster than expected. At its peak, Akraya handled over 12 million messages in a single day — not a number we planned for, and one that made the decision to stay free both more important and harder to sustain.

Jan 2024 Akraya goes live. One developer, one server, models running entirely on our own hardware.
Summer 2025 We go offline. The honest reason: the domain wasn't renewed, the $500/month server cost had no sustainable answer, and one person can only carry so much alone. The users were still there. Being a solo project with no backing meant there was nothing to push back with.
21 Aug 2026 Akraya comes back online. Quieter, simpler, and more focused than before.
Before we shut down, keeping Akraya running cost around $500 a month — our own hardware, our own models. A stack from Marella/CTransformers doing the heavy lifting locally. It worked. It just wasn't sustainable for a free service with no revenue.

This time around we moved everything to Cloudflare Workers AI, which handles the infrastructure so we don't have to. The models are smaller than we'd like, and responses are sometimes shorter than before — but it means Akraya can stay online and stay free without a monthly bill that would eventually force us to charge for it.

Your conversation is held in temporary memory for 30 minutes and then deleted. No permanent logs, no database, no account required.

The crisis detection system — the part that reads what you've written and decides how carefully to respond — is built entirely in-house. No external service, no API call. Just code we've spent a long time making more careful and more human.

At the moment, Akraya can handle around 1,000 messages a day for free. A long way from the 12 million we once saw — but as a one-person team with a limited budget, expanding capacity means choosing between growth and staying free. We choose free.

Real-time voice call was one of the things people genuinely loved in the early days. It is currently disabled. We lost the partnership that made it possible to run larger, faster models behind it. We haven't given up on bringing it back, but we won't bring it back half-baked. When it returns it will be worth it.

Keep it free. That's the main goal. Mental health support shouldn't cost money to access.

We're also still — after three years — trying to turn Akraya into a proper mobile app. It's harder than it sounds when you're one person and the priority is making the experience good before making it native. We'll get there.

In the meantime, the web version works on mobile. It's not perfect. Neither are we.

The gentle guitar you may hear in the background is "Warm Guitar Nostalgia" by AbsoluteSound, used under the Pixabay Content License. We don't need to credit them, but we wanted to — it's a lovely piece and we're grateful they made it freely available.

We accept a single banner placement — one ad, one partner, nothing else. If you're interested, we'll share only the total visitor count. No demographics, no behavioural data, no tracking. If that works for you:

Questions, feedback, or something important to report:

Developer: AKRAYA  ·  [email protected]

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