About Speechbox

Speechbox started in spring of 2007 as a solo weekend coding project for the German-speaking market. From then on, it grew organically and without any marketing efforts at all, until it reached the coveted number one spot on the most popular search engines for the term "free shoutbox" in Germany. Its founder and initial single developer, Tim Teege, found joy in building new features and helping users put something special and interactive into their personal websites.

Over the years, a few other developers joined in and helped build more complicated features, such as the realtime chat capabilities, which required financial investments. This led to the introduction of the Premium Upgrade to avoid making a net negative with the project. Thankfully, many users became customers and thereby supported the efforts to build more features and keep the server infrastructure afloat and maintenance cost paid for.

In 2024, Speechbox is a solo project, but motivation couldn’t be much higher to keep it going and build it up further. Inspite of big social media companies and other providers, the personal independent website or blog has a strong standing within the internet community, and making that website more interesting with an interactive element such as a shoutbox is a great option.

If you would like to support the efforts to keep Speechbox going and growing, please consider signing up for a Premium Upgrade. Thank you very much. ❤️

Open Source and Free Tools We’re Building On

We all would be nothing without the work other humans have done before us. Even though it’s not required to mention them here, we would like to give a big shout to those who made Speechbox possible by making their work available for free. ❤️.

  • FontAwesome: We’ve been early backers of their Kickstarter campaign and love their icon work. This website makes use of many of the free SVG icons they provide to everyone who wants them.
  • Socket.IO by Guillermo Rauch: This makes our realtime chat functionality work in the front end.
  • Chart.js: Beautiful visualizations of the Speechbox’ usage data thanks to the huge number of contributors.
  • Coloris by Momo Bassit: A simple and easy to use color picker which makes freely designing the shoutboxes a lot better.
  • Emoji Picker Element by Nolan Lawson: Nolan has set out to build a great emoji picker on his own. We love its flexibility and how it makes using emoji a lot easier to everyday users.