Article brough to you by LeafPlaza: the sovereign European social platform built entirely on European infrastructure, owned and operated in the EU.

We just published our roadmap and financing milestones page. Nothing flashy: it is a list of goals tied to subscriber numbers, and an honest answer to "why haven't you built this yet." But it's another step in something we take seriously: showing our work and where are we heading.

Why it matters

Most platforms treat their roadmap as a marketing asset. We're treating ours as a transparency asset. If you're going to trust us with a subscription, you should see exactly what that money unlocks, and exactly why we are still slow without it.

Who's building this

Both of the co-founders still hold fractional Product and Engineering roles at other companies. LeafPlaza is the project we'd drop everything else for, the moment it can support us full time. We do not want it to be a side project.

We didn't walk into this cold. Our backgrounds are mobile-heavy, but between the two of us we've also shipped infrastructure, APIs, monetization systems, analytics, and SaaS products. We're both the type who shows up to hackathons for fun, not because a job made us. LeafPlaza is what happens when that instinct stops being a hobby.

The four milestones

Everything is financed out of our own pockets right now, and that doesn't scale. So the roadmap ties concrete features to subscriber goals:

  • 500 active subscribers: we open-source our repositories. Anyone will get to inspect it, and anyone gets to push back on what they find.

  • 1,000 active subscribers: our own EU relay. Right now we lean on Bluesky's relay to pull in and distribute content, which means if Bluesky goes down or censors something, so do we. Our goal is to reduce dependency and improve resilience.

  • 5,000 active subscribers: creator payments. Monthly subscriptions, follower-funded, starting simple.

  • 10,000 active subscribers: a federated, end-to-end encrypted DM layer, built into the protocol itself instead of bolted onto one app.

Why creators come first

We said it before and we will say it again: creators are trapped. Not by bad platforms necessarily, but by monopolies that decide the only way to get paid is to play by one company's rules, on one company's terms. We want monetization on LeafPlaza to exist in every form we can build for the convenience of creators, not just the one model that's easiest for us to ship or monetize.

When creators win, they don't just stay, they build. More reasons to stay mean a stronger platform, and a stronger platform means more room for everyone else to win too. It also means better content for all users. Betting on creators is betting on the platform's health.

Why private DMs are the other half

Europe still runs its messaging on foreign infrastructure. WhatsApp and Telegram are the obvious ones. Even Signal, open source as it is, still sits on US infrastructure and doesn't talk to anything outside itself.

Our approach: don't ship "another encrypted messenger." Bundle real, private DMs directly into a federated social protocol people already use. No new app to convince anyone to download, no phone number to hand over, just the account you already have. And because we're building this as a protocol-level layer instead of a walled feature, any AT Protocol app can pick it up and ship it in their own UI. Wider adoption it's the point.

Why it's slow, and why that's fine

Neither of the founders works on LeafPlaza full time yet. We rely on paid jobs to cover life while we build this on the side, so progress moves at the pace two people with day jobs can manage. Private investment isn't on the table for us, so we're chasing public grants instead, as long as they don't come with strings that compromise how we build. And, of course, we aim to gain your trust with a subscription.

Slow and independent beats fast and owned by someone else. That's the trade we're making, in public, on purpose.

Disclaimer

The current thresholds show what recurring subscription revenue could sustainably fund at the moment of writing. Grants may bring work forward, while technical, security, regulatory or operating cost findings may change scope. They are not release dates or guarantees.

What's next

The roadmap page is live now. Excuse us while we update other pages in our website with this information. If you ever wonder why it's taking the time it's taking, check that page. If you want to see us move faster through it, a subscription is the most direct way to do that.