D
Dad 07:15
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This is the whole thing. Scroll it.
It belongs to your family. Not to us, and not to whoever would pay for it.
No stranger can find it, reach it, or join it. The only door is an invitation from someone already inside, used once, that expires. There is nothing to search and nobody to discover.
We make money one way: whoever sets a room up pays for it. That's the entire business, and it's the boring one on purpose, because every other way of paying for a place like this ends with somebody studying your family. Nothing you post is read for advertising, for ranking, or to train a model, by us or by anyone else. No adverts, no trackers, no data brokers, no analytics company.
Anyone can keep anything, and what gets kept becomes the family's record. We will never delete it to save money, to make room, or because you stopped paying. Originals stay full size. Looking is free forever, whether or not you're the one paying. Nobody will ever be charged to see their own grandchildren.
Which is why children can be in it without being on social media. And when a child in a room turns eighteen, we show them what was posted about them before they were old enough to decide, and take out anything they'd rather wasn't there. That one isn't a setting, and it isn't a favour.
Roost is early. It's being built by one person, for his own family first, and it isn't yet open to sign up.
José Picardo
Technically, yes, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Roost runs on rented servers, and the people who run Roost are able to open what is on them. A promise you cannot keep is not worth printing.
So can almost everyone else, and it is worth knowing how ordinary that is. Apple can open the photographs in a British iCloud account, because the setting that would stop them, Advanced Data Protection, has been unavailable in the UK since February 2025. Snapchat's own terms reserve the right to access, review and delete your content at any time and for any reason. Photographs on Facebook and Instagram have never been encrypted in a way that shuts Meta out, and Instagram switched off its optional encrypted messaging in May 2026. Facebook Messenger is a real exception, and so is WhatsApp: those conversations are encrypted by default and Meta genuinely cannot read them.
None of which makes it fine. It means the useful question is not whether a company is able to look, but what stops them from looking, and whether they told you. Our answer is a rule and a record. Nobody at Roost opens a family's room except to fix a fault we cannot fix any other way, or because the law requires it. Every time it happens it is written down, dated, and shown to the room on request.
No. WhatsApp wins that one and we are not going to pretend the row does not exist.
End-to-end encryption would mean nobody could ever recover your family's record, including us, including you, if the keys were lost. For a chat app that ends the day you read it, that is the right trade. For something meant to outlive the people in it, we think it is the wrong one. So we have chosen a rule and a written record over a promise the maths makes for us, and we have told you which one you are getting.
A small number of suppliers, named in the privacy notice. They store and move the data for us and are contractually barred from using it for anything else. There is no advertising company, no analytics company and no data broker in that list, and there never will be.
If a UK court or the police make a lawful demand, we have to comply. We will tell the room unless we are legally barred from saying so.
Nothing is removed and nothing is locked. Looking is free forever, whether or not you are the one paying. Only opening a new room needs somebody to be paying.
Yes, whenever you like, in one download: the words as plain text and the photographs, voice notes and scans as the original files at full size. You do not need Roost, or an account, to open any of it.
You can take out anything you posted, whenever you want. If you leave a room, nobody is told. Whoever set a room up can close it, which stops anything new being added while leaving everything already in it readable forever.
What you cannot do is delete other people's photographs, and we would rather be straight about that than let you find out later. A picture of five people at Christmas is five people's picture. What you can always remove is yourself: your account, the things you wrote, and your name and face inside the things other people wrote.
There is nothing to scroll past the end of, nobody to discover, no strangers, no audience and no score. A child can only be added to a room by their own parent, and a parent who wants to see what is in a room joins it, so the child can always see who is there. There is no way to watch a child without them knowing.
When a child turns eighteen we show them what was posted about them before they were old enough to decide, and take out anything they would rather was not there. If they would rather do it later, or ten years later, we will do it then.