One app, built the hard way.
Surf is not a feed with features bolted on. The ranking, the encryption, the studio, and the payments are all first-party, and they all answer to the same account.
Nine things, one account.
Each of these is usually its own app. On Surf they share an identity, a feed, and one set of privacy settings.
A feed you control
Ten sliders, twelve plain-English rules, and a published scoring formula. There is no ad slot in the ranker.
Encrypted messaging
An X3DH handshake and a Double Ratchet on every direct message, with sender keys for groups.
Voice and video calls
WebRTC with DTLS-SRTP, connecting device to device whenever the network allows.
A creator studio
A multi-track editor, an AR camera, and a chat-driven editing agent, all in a browser tab.
Live streaming
Go live from the browser, with Super Chats paid straight through to you.
Spaces
Communities with their own feed, roles, rules, invites, and a moderation log.
On-device vision
Face tracking, background removal, and unsafe-image screening run locally, on your machine.
Teen safety
Stricter defaults for teen accounts, enforced in the database rather than the interface.
Payments
Platform subscriptions, creator fan subscriptions, and escrowed brand deals, all on Stripe.
Published, not proprietary.
A reply is worth 7.0. A repost is 5.0, a like is 0.5, and not interested is −50, the strongest signal in the system. Your sliders scale those numbers directly. Where Surf has learned a preference you never set, it is capped at ±0.6 on a ±1.0 axis, so anything you set by hand wins outright.
How your feed is scored
Signal's protocol, built in.
Direct messages use an X3DH handshake and a Double Ratchet over X25519 and AES-256-GCM, so a key exposed today cannot unlock what you sent yesterday. Group threads up to 256 people use sender keys. You can confirm any contact with a 60-digit safety number.
X3DH
Two devices agree on a shared secret without either private key ever leaving them.
Double Ratchet
Every message derives a fresh key, so yesterday's messages stay sealed.
Safety number
Sixty digits both sides read aloud to prove nobody is in the middle.
X25519 key agreement, AES-256-GCM messages, HKDF-SHA256 chains.
You choose who fills the feed.
Everyone, the people you follow, or an inner circle built from who you actually talk to rather than who you followed once and forgot. One tap, and it applies to the whole feed.
Who fills your feed
Money that does not need your attention.
Subscriptions at $10, $20, and $40 a month. Fan subscriptions and Super Chats at a 20% platform fee, which also covers card processing. Brand deals in escrow at 8%. There is no fourth line of revenue, and none of these get better when you scroll longer.
Card processing comes out of our share
Settled through Stripe
Escrowed until the work is accepted
A feed the viewer controls, and encryption that is on by default, are hard to add to a business that sells attention.
They are also the two things regulators keep asking for. Surf started with both, which is a far easier place to start than to arrive at.
Where we would rather tell you.
Every platform has caveats. Most of them are buried in a help article nobody reads. Here are ours.
- Paid accounts rank higher.
- A subscription multiplies a post's ranking score by 1.5×, 2.5×, or 4×, on replies and in For You. It is the only thumb on the scale, it cannot beat a setting you chose, and we would rather print it here than let you find it.
- Most of the AI is not on your device.
- Face tracking, background removal, and image screening run locally. Summaries, search, captions, and the writing tools run on servers we rent. The Intelligence page says which is which.
- Calls are not always peer to peer.
- They connect device to device when the network allows it. When it does not, media is relayed by a third party that cannot read it. Encrypted either way, but not always direct.
- Group chats have a ceiling.
- End-to-end encryption covers group threads up to 256 people. Above that, messages are stored on our servers and the app shows no lock.
- Some of it is not finished.
- Larger group calls are built but not yet on the call path. Creator payouts are United States only for now.