Frequently asked questions
Yes! We have an active volunteer group of dedicated volunteers working across development and operations. We are releasing features every month, we have simply reduced the rate of sending out email newsletters to make sure they are of higher quality, more interesting and relevant.
Yes. We not only strive to be a viable alternative to Couchsurfing™ but also to be the most safe, modern, and active couch surfing community. We aim to build the features people have come to love across all platforms, but with many improvements. We have also added completely new features which help enhance the couch surfing experience for everyone.
Yes, mobile apps are critical for all travel platforms. We are currently working on native apps for iOS and Android and hope to release them in early 2026. For now, you can bookmark the Couchers.org website to your phone's home screen to have it behave like an app.
We fundamentally believe that attempting to make a profit out of couch surfing is a bad idea. It introduces incentives that damage the community and would not make financial sense — the couch surfing idea, based on non-transactional experiences, is not monetizable. This is about societal value, not monetary value.
We are keeping the platform as a non-profit forever. Our plan to follow this relies on three fundamental pillars:
We are legally established as a non-profit foundation, and our constitution contains provisions that prevents the company from ceasing to be a non-profit, or transferring its assets to an entity that is not a non-profit.
We will carry out a policy of distributed moderation, so that we will engage hundreds of moderators as volunteers around the world to moderate their own communities. We will make the platform reliant on volunteers, and so the entity controlling the platform could not be a for-profit business without violating laws in many countries. The foundation would have to remain as a non-profit to continue operating.
Our code base is open source and anybody can spin up an alternative instance. If the community ever comes to feel that the leaders of the platform are not acting in their interest, they can simply fork the codebase, making a copy that is under control of new management.
Finally, we do hope that you can trust our Founders (Aapeli and Itsi) and Board Members in their promise to keep the platform not only community-led, non-profit, and open-source, but in line with the greater interests of the global couch surfing community.
Most everyone on our team has had amazing experiences couch surfing, but we'd like to see the experience improved. A lot of us come from community leadership backgrounds including co-ops, clubs, unions, and open-source projects. We understand the value of communities and get a lot of joy in seeing them thrive. Quite honestly though, we want to build something that we'd want to use so we can have a better time when we're hosting or traveling.
We don't plan on making money out of this. There is no money to be made out of this. That's one important lesson we can learn from the monetization of Couchsurfing™.
We are approaching this from a different angle. BeWelcome and TrustRoots have built platforms that are functionally different from Couchsurfing™. We aim to build a platform that is functionally more similar (hosting, surfing, hangouts, events, etc. in a convenient app), but modernized, far better designed and built, and with the interests of the couch surfing community as the main priority.
There are also some core ideas that we want to build into the foundations, and that requires something new. With good architecture and design we can encourage healthy communities, improve user safety, filter out creeps and freeloaders, and make the experience a better one for all users.
Absolutely! Head on over to our donations page. You may need to create an account first.
If you want to help out in other ways, please get in touch and join the team.
The main cost that a couch surfing platform needs to cover is the cost of server hosting and the third-party services required to operate the platform.
As we scale we will also need to pay for additional:
We believe moderation can be built into the system where necessary so that trusted members of the community can take charge of most moderation actions, and we can rely on the volunteer efforts of moderators. This method is community-first, cost-effective, scalable, and cements the community into the functioning of the platform.
On the development end, we will initially handle the build and development of the platform ourselves. We’re in the process of onboarding more volunteers, and hope to hand over a number of development and maintenance tasks to individuals from the community.
Server hosting is our main cost, but we believe we will easily be able to cover the cost of hosting through donations from the community. We believe that if we build a great platform for the community, the community will be willing to pitch in enough to keep it going.
There are many companies that are not profit-seeking that perform far better than their competitors and provide greater societal value, including Wikipedia, TED, Khan Academy and the Red Cross (go donate some blood).
We believe people are craving authentic, community spaces outside the sphere of investor influence.