Team chat and paid communities in one free desktop app

Barside Spaces puts team chat and paid communities in the same free desktop app you use for notes. A Space is a private room with its own chat, shared notes, links and files. Invite your team to one, and it works like a calm group chat with a memory. Share a link to promote it, and approve each person who asks to join. Set a price on another, and members pay by card through Stripe before they get in.

Spaces is the online part of Barside, an app that otherwise keeps your library on your own computer. Here is what a Space holds, how to run one, and what is stored online.

How Spaces works for team chat and paid communities

Open Spaces from the sidebar or the desktop bar and sign in with Google or an email code. The account is free. The first time, Spaces offers an eight-step tour of its controls, and the question-mark button beside the expand and close buttons replays it.

Each Space has five tabs:

• Chat: messages with replies, edits, reactions, @mentions, emoji and optional GIFs. Press Enter to send and Shift+Enter for a new line. Paste a screenshot to attach it, when the owner allows uploads.
• Notes: shared notes that keep their formatting, pictures, video and audio. Write one with New note, or share a note from your library.
• Resources: shared links, added with Add link or shared from your bookmarks.
• Files: documents and other files, added with Upload file. See file sharing for teams and communities.
• Members: the people in the Space, with their handle, role and online status, plus the invitation tools. If the owner hides the members list, members see only the owner, the moderators and themselves.

Anyone who can post can also start a poll: 2 to 10 options, one or several choices, and an optional closing time. Everyone in the Space sees the results and who voted.

Anything worth keeping can come home with you. Save to my workspace copies a shared note or message into your own library as an independent note, and a shared link into your workspace bookmarks. Later changes in the Space do not touch your copy.

Team chat: a private Space for your team

Every signed-in person can create private Spaces, and a private Space is invitation only. For a team, that means a room per team or project, with the conversation and the reference material side by side.

• Share work from your library. The share button on a note (Share note to a Space) or on a bookmark makes a copy for the Space after a preview. Your own note stays yours, and your later edits do not change the shared copy.
• Meet when chat is not enough. Video meetings for up to six people live in the Meetings tab and use the same sign-in. See free video meetings for small groups.
• Status and alerts. Set yourself Online, Away, Do not disturb or Invisible, which others see as offline. Choose alerts for Mentions only or All new activity, set quiet hours, mute a busy Space, or get unread activity by email while Barside is closed.
• Unread counts show on the Spaces button of the desktop bar, so you see new messages without opening the app.
• Star the Spaces you use most, and they stay at the top of Your Spaces.

If most of your day is working with others, Team Mode keeps meetings, Spaces, your calendar, tasks, agents and Library in the sidebar and opens on Meetings. See app modes.

Paid communities: charge for access with Stripe

A Space owner can charge for access in Manage Space → Pricing & payments. Choose the Access price:

Prices are in US or Canadian dollars, from 1 to 10,000. Before you can save a price, enter your Business country and choose Connect Stripe to finish Stripe's own setup. Payments then go straight to your Stripe account, and Stripe pays you on the schedule set there. Barside never holds your money and never sees a card number.

What it costs you: Barside keeps 8% of each payment, including every renewal, or 5% while you have Barside Plus. Stripe charges its own processing fees to your Stripe account. There is no monthly fee for the Space itself.

What your members see: a $ in place of the lock on your Space, and a Join button with the price on their invitation. People join a paid Space from an invitation, or ask to join from its share link, like any private Space. After you approve, they pay on Stripe's checkout page when they accept, before they get in. Nobody pays before approval. Memberships & billing lists their memberships, with Stop renewal and Billing & receipts, which opens Stripe's portal for receipts and cards.

Rules worth knowing before you set a price:

• Existing members keep their deal. Free members keep free access when you start charging, and subscribers keep their agreed price. Switching a Space back to free stops their subscriptions, and they keep their access.
• Stopping renewal keeps access until the paid period ends. Leaving a Space stops future billing.
• Barside gives no refunds. You may refund a payment yourself in your Stripe Dashboard: a full refund ends that member's access, and a partial one keeps it. Barside keeps its fee on refunded and disputed payments.
• Cards only for now, with no coupons or free trials.
• Taxes on your sales are yours. Barside does not calculate or collect tax on them. You can turn on Stripe Tax in your Stripe account.
• Where you can sell. Creator accounts work in the countries Stripe serves, except Brazil for now, and members can pay from anywhere Stripe accepts cards.

The full rules are in the Terms for creators and the refund terms.

Share your Space with a link

You do not need everyone's email address to grow a Space. Owners and moderators open Manage Space → Share link and choose Create link. Copy link puts an address that starts with https://barside.space/space# on the clipboard, ready for a post, a newsletter or a profile.

• What people see. The link opens the Space's card on barside.space, with Open in Barside and Download Barside. The card shows the name, description and color, the member count if you show it, and the price if the Space is paid. It never shows members, email addresses or posts, and nobody needs to sign in to see it.
• Ask to join. In Barside, people choose Ask to join and can add a message to the owner, up to 300 characters. Someone who got the link another way can paste it into Join with a link in the Spaces sidebar.
• You approve. You and your moderators get a notification and a badge. Manage Space → Join requests shows each person's name, handle and message, with Approve and Decline. Approving sends a normal invitation, and the person sees their request until then.
• Paid Spaces. Approval comes first. The invitation shows the price, and the person pays on Stripe's checkout page when they accept it, so nobody pays before you say yes.
• Replace or stop it. Replace link makes a new address, and the old one stops working at once. Turn off stops the link.

A request waits up to 30 days, and each person can have one open request per Space. After a decline, they can ask again after 7 days. Removed members, and people who blocked you or whom you blocked, cannot join.

Invitations from members. When Members may send invitations is on, the owner can keep control with Invitations from members need approval in Space settings. It is on by default. A member's invitation then waits under Invitations waiting for approval until you or a moderator approve it, and the invited person gets nothing until then.

The share link guide walks through links, join requests and invitation approval.

How to start a Space

1. Open Spaces and choose Continue with Google or Email me a sign-in code. The first time, pick a display name and a handle, and add a photo or one of the illustrated avatars if you like.
2. Choose Create Space. Give it a Space name, a Description of what it is for, and a Color. Spaces you create are private: invitation only.
3. Open Manage Space and use Invite someone. Invite by Email address, even if the person has not joined Barside yet, or by Handle or user ID. Invitations expire after 7 days, and you can revoke one while it waits. To reach people you do not know yet, make a Share link instead.
4. For a paid community, open Pricing & payments, enter your Business country, choose Connect Stripe and finish Stripe's steps. Then pick the Access price, Amount and Currency, and choose Save pricing.
5. Under Space settings, decide whether Members may send invitations, whether Invitations from members need approval, and who can upload files and share links: everyone, or only you.

Keep it calm: roles and moderation

A Space has three roles. The owner, who created it, changes the settings, sets the price, makes moderators and can archive the Space. Moderators remove posts and members, review reports, set slow mode and approve join requests. Members post, react, vote and save copies.

• Reports. Any member can choose Report post and say what moderators should know. Reports wait under Reports to review, with Mark resolved and Remove post.
• Removing people. Remove member takes someone out and stops them from rejoining; Allow new invitation undoes that later. Any member can block someone, mute a Space or leave it.
• Slow mode. In Moderation, make members wait 5 seconds to 1 hour between posts. Owners and moderators are not limited, and the Space heading shows that slow mode is on.
• Read-only. Set Who can post? to Only owners and moderators. Members still read, react, vote in polls and open files, which suits announcements.
• A flood guard is always on. A member who sends more than 5 messages within 10 seconds waits a minute. Barside counts down the seconds and keeps what they typed.
• Pinned messages. Owners and moderators pin a chat message or a poll with the Pin message button under it. A slim "Pinned" bar above the chat opens the list, newest first, with the author, the time and the first lines; choose one to jump to it in the chat, even when it is far back. A Space holds up to 50 pins, which suits the rules, a welcome note or this week's call link. In Moderation, Who can pin messages? lets the owner choose Everyone. Notes, links and files cannot be pinned.
• AI moderation. In Manage Space → AI moderation, the owner lets the AI connected in Settings → AI check new messages from members for spam and scams, harassment and hate, sexual content, threats and violence, sharing someone's private information, and the owner's own rules (up to 2,000 characters). Choose Report to moderators, the default, which sends each problem to Reports to review with the AI's reason, or Remove clear violations and report the rest. Messages from the owner, moderators and the Space helper are never checked, and neither are messages sent before it was turned on. It runs on the owner's computer only while Barside runs, checks messages in small batches to keep AI costs low, and every member sees "Messages here are checked by the owner's AI for rule-breaking." The owner's AI company bills each check.

Owners and moderators also see Member numbers: total members, who joined and who posted in the last 7 and 30 days, messages per day for 30 days, the top five contributors and pending invitations. Only they see these numbers.

To answer the same questions less often, the owner can turn on the Space helper. It answers members from what the Space has shared, with the owner's own AI, and sends anything it cannot answer to the owner.

To have the chat watched when no moderator is around, see AI moderation with the AI you already use.

Examples

• A product team keeps a Space per project: decisions in Chat, specs in Notes, dashboards in Resources, and a weekly meeting in the Meetings tab.
• A design club charges $12 a month. Lessons go in Notes, worksheets in Files, and the Space helper answers "when are office hours?" from an FAQ note.
• A course cohort pays once for a six-week program and picks the next session's topic with a poll.
• A consultant gives each client a private Space for drafts and files, instead of long email threads.
• A family shares photos, recipes and holiday plans in a free Space.

Details that matter

• Systems. Spaces runs in the Barside app on Windows 10 and 11, on Linux and on Mac. Everyone in a Space needs the app and a free Spaces account. Joining from a browser works for meetings, not for Spaces.
• One chat per Space. Replies quote the earlier message rather than open a thread. For separate topics, make separate Spaces.
• Refresh. An open Space refreshes every four seconds, and Barside checks for new mentions, invitations and join requests every 15 seconds while it runs.
• Files. Up to 20 MB each (100 MB for a video) and 12 per message, with 250 MB of uploads per account.

Privacy: what Spaces stores online

Messages, shared notes, links, files, profiles and memberships are stored with Supabase, Barside's hosting provider. Connections use HTTPS, files sit in private storage, and the server checks membership for every read, upload and download. Spaces is not end-to-end encrypted, so Barside's hosting administrators can access the data.

• Only what you post or share leaves your computer. A note or bookmark goes as a copy you preview first.
• Members can save copies. Removing a post or a member cannot take back a copy someone already downloaded.
• Shared content goes to an AI only when the Space's owner turns on the Space helper or AI moderation for that Space, and then it goes to the AI the owner connected. AI moderation sends the text of new member messages without names or user IDs; see AI moderation. The tools your AI apps use through AI connections cannot see Spaces.
• A share link shows only the Space's card. The code in the link stays after the #, so it never reaches the website's server. A join request's message is deleted once the request is answered, cancelled or expired; see share links and join requests.
• Your sign-in is stored encrypted on your computer and left out of backups.
• For paid Spaces, Barside keeps the membership, price, dates, payment state and Stripe's reference numbers, never card details.

Read the Spaces section of the privacy page and paid Spaces and your data. To ask for an export of a Space or to erase your account, write to support@barside.space.

How it compares

• Slack. Its Free plan keeps 90 days of message history and allows one-on-one huddles, and Pro costs US$8.75 per user a month when paying monthly, as of September 2026. Barside Spaces has no per-person price: chat, shared notes and files are free. The Slack alternative guide compares them in full.
• Skool. Its Hobby plan is $9 a month with a 10% transaction fee, and Pro is $99 a month with a 2.9% transaction fee, as of September 2026. Barside has no monthly fee and keeps 8%, or 5% with Plus, with Stripe's processing fees on top. Compare the totals for your own price, and read the Skool alternative.
• Everything else. The best community platforms list covers free and paid options, including where others fit better, such as a large public community that needs a web version.

Works well with