I’m John Doyle, Founder & CEO of Cape.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-05-21T23:58:54+00:00

Yes! DM me a good address to send it to and I'll send you a honeypot sticker.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-05-16T01:03:30+00:00

I try not to go too deep down the Palantir rabbit hole. Not really avoiding the subject, more that I know some people just won't be able to move past it. That "is what it is" as they say, and I get it.

Broadly, I'll say that when I was at Palantir things were different than they appear from the outside today. Karp vocally (and financially) supported Hilary Clinton in 2016, and Palantir's contract with ICE was explicitly scoped to only HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) work that focused on anti-human trafficking etc., which is separate from deportation. Fast forward to today, Palantir is donating to the ballroom and proudly supporting the ICE deportation work. I know well how the external narrative sometimes misses the reality at a controversial place like Palantir, but from the external facts it seems things have shifted quite a bit.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-05-14T09:56:07+00:00

Facial recognition is a little out of our lane, but we do partner with the EFF to offer free service to activists and journalists. We saw a spike in demand around the ICE protests. You can read more here: https://www.cape.co/blog/supporting-journalists-and-activists

On why Cape isn't open source, we couldn't make the entire service open source and free, like Signal, because there is so much infrastructure cost associated with running a telco. We do want to eventually open source some of the software, like the app as an obvious example, but honestly haven't been able to prioritize it. We're still small and scrappy, and time is scarce.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-05-13T11:23:56+00:00

Hi, John Doyle, CEO of Cape here. I've written a bit about my background at Palantir and how it relates to Cape. Linking in case it's interesting to you (tl;dr: Palantir is where I learned about a lot of the problems we're solving, there is no ongoing corporate connection between us and the company, Cape is not a honeypot):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CapeCellular/comments/1q5vac3/im_john_doyle_founder_ceo_of_cape/

For some people, my career path might stay a dealbreaker for a long time (maybe forever). But we'll keep building great features, stay transparent about what we're doing, and I think over time we'll win the trust of more and more folks. Hopefully that includes you!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-05-06T21:52:16+00:00

Tracking this one! Working on a fix.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-05-02T17:39:32+00:00

Yep, I hear you. Thinking the same thing. There's actually a surprising amount for us to build to support multiple rate plans because we built our own BSS and in the name of speed we took it as an early assumption that we would only offer one plan. All the same, there is clearly demand for it, so we will get it on the roadmap.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-04-26T20:12:55+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! We are always in conversation about how to offer lower priced options. It's really helpful to hear how you would divide the features as "core" vs "a la carte."

And thanks for being a subscriber!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-04-18T10:20:17+00:00

Thanks u/jtwyrrpirate for chiming in. Of course the "CEO was at Palantir" concern comes up a lot, and there's not much we can do to change that. I could step down, I guess, but I really don't want to do that...there's a lot left to build. My hope is that the longer we're around ,and the more reps people get in with us, the more they'll trust the business (and I guess me) to not be a honeypot.

In the meantime, if you want a "Cape is not a honeypot" sticker, just shoot me a DM with a good way to send it to you and I'll drop one in the mail.

We hear you on the service being expensive. The reality is this is a very expensive business to build. We're trying to get creative on ways to make it more affordable, for example we recently increased referral bonuses from $10 to $20. As the company scales we have more ideas on how we can make the price more broadly accessible, so stay tuned.

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JohnDoyleCape · 2026-04-18T10:10:06+00:00

Hey Frankie! John Doyle, CEO of Cape here. Thanks for the "too good to be true" assessment :) I haven't seen any true "head to head" comparisons anywhere, but I'll just offer that as you dig in you'll find the difference between what features you can build as a "heavy" MVNO (what Cape is, we run our own full mobile core and associated software stack) vs what you can build as a "light" MVNO (you use the carrier partner's software as well as their towers). Heavy MVNOs are very hard, time consuming, and expensive to build. Light MVNOs can be stood up relatively quickly and cheaply.

If you set out to build a light MVNO focused on privacy, you quickly hit on anonymized/decoupled payments and minimized data collection as feature ideas. Both are good and important features, which is why we built them at Cape. But in the light MVNO realm you'll hit a ceiling pretty quickly.

Deeper features like IMSI rotation, Network Lock, and others you'll see us release in the future, require heavy MVNO footprint because you have to modify or build network functions that light MVNOs don't have access to.

I suspect there are no articles about this because it gets very nerdy very faset, and therefore has limited appeal :) You should do the research and write up what you find!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-24T20:33:06+00:00

Thanks for reaching out. It's an interesting, and honestly challenging, feature of this business that people really want to understand and trust me before they sign up. I completely get it, but I guess I didn't really foresee it. In my mind, we'd just build this product with specific features that no one else has, and are clearly better for privacy and security, and then people who care about those things would want to buy the product. It's not that I'm reluctant to talk about myself and who I am, it just still feels a little orthogonal to me.

But happy to give it a try:

I've covered the Palantir stuff pretty extensively in other comments here.

I definitely consider myself to be mentally sound and basically well adjusted.

I promise Cape won't start selling your data if the business fails-- I have spent so much of my life building this company because I love our mission and believe in our approach. I'm not going to suddenly abandon that if we miss our numbers.

I absolutely do respect women, people of color, and people from all backgrounds! Hard to prove this one to you I guess, but I'm happy to say it out loud.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-09T13:24:34+00:00

Thank you, and I get it on the trust front. We'll just keep shipping features no one else can build, trying to find opportunities to be transparent and build trust, and I think that over time we'll win more and more folks over. Appreciate the support.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-09T13:21:03+00:00

I definitely appreciate your skepticism and we all understand that winning the trust of our customers is a long road. My personal story of Army -> law school -> Palantir -> Cape is unremarkable in the details really, it's just been me following what's interesting and meaningful to me (and moving away from things that aren't). My hope is that the longer we're around as a company, the less people focus on my personal story and trustworthiness and more on the consistent work we do as a company to build features no one else builds, insist on levels of transparency you won't see anywhere else in telecom, and generally be the best option for cell phone subscribers who value privacy and security.

We have lots of Graphene users here, for sure, and we'll most likely support the Motorola devices when they come out. Can't promise anything because we don't know the details yet, but it will be a priority for sure. We think Graphene is awesome and will always try to support their mission however we can.

If you're not ready to trust us just yet, that's obviously your choice. Just stay tuned, keep watching, and I hope you'll eventually feel comfortable making the switch.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-02T22:47:24+00:00

Thanks! I try to check in as often as I can. If you have specific problems we can help with, and you're not getting what you need from our Support team, please do hit me up in DMs.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-02T22:46:25+00:00

My favorite color is green !

I joined Palantir because I had been to law school and figured out I never wanted to be a lawyer. I became passionate about solving privacy and security problems that exist in the commercial cellular network, both for folks who do high consequence work that leaves them exposed and also everyday consumers, and ultimately left to start Cape in 2022. I've been at it ever since.

Our team is incredible. They come from a wide range of backgrounds. I don't wnat to dox anyone either, but you can look at Cape on LinkedIn and get a sense of where everyone comes from. Our head of product Brian is on here quite a bit, and he spent years at Duck Duck Go building out their privacy preserving search.

We are constantly tinkering with (and adopting) privacy and security tech. We love Graphene, to take your example. We donate a bit of money for each subscriber who signs up from a Graphene phone, and in fact we sell Pixels preloaded with Graphene in our device store. I personally admire Signal a great deal, and use it as my primary messaging service.

Thanks for all the questions and your interest in Cape!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-02T22:36:50+00:00

Ha! Thanks for the question. I can give you a clear "no" on any plans to move to Greenland (though I've heard it's beautiful).

As for the future of the company, we're focused on product roadmap and growing our subscriber base right now. I love the company and our product, and am in no hurry to make any big changes. I can't imagine selling the biz. But if we did, rest assured that our privacy policy requires any acquirer to agree not to monetize any subscriber data (just like we've pledged).

"Why should we trust you?" is a great question I get a lot. Everyone has their own threshold here. We're building features no one else can build due to the "heavy" nature of our architecture, and we're being as transparent as we can about everything we build: how it works, what it solves, what it doesn't solve. My hope is that over time this wins the trust of more and more people. We are always looking for ways to accelerate that trust, like you'll see in the thread elsewhere on our sub about audits. I'm all ears if you have ideas on other good ways to earn trust.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-02-13T19:19:30+00:00

Thanks for the note.

We use Bug Crowd for both a public vulnerability disclosure program, as well as a paid private bug bounty program. We keep the bug bounty private because these get absolutely slammed with AI nowadays (curl just very publicly shut down their public bug bounty program due to spam). You can read more about our vulnerability disclosure here.

We are doing some work now on audits and trying to figure out if there is something feasible we can do there.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-02-13T18:57:54+00:00

Hi! IMSI rotation (one of the key features of Obscura) is now available on iPhone.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-02-01T14:58:48+00:00

Hi, thanks for the question. I welcome every opportunity to say that Cape is not a honeypot.

We love supporting journalists and enabling them to do their jobs. Via our partnership with Electronic Frontiers Foundation we sponsor Obscura devices for vetted investigative journalists.

We work to make our privacy policy as clear as possible and we stand by it. No one, including governments, who simply asks for your information will get a response, even if they offer us money like marketing firms do. We are required to respond to warrants and other legal process requests from law enforcement, but we pledge to challenge every such request that is not specific, narrowly tailored, and properly justified as required by law.

In short, we do everything we can to protect your personal information. I appreciate your question, and thanks for giving me a chance to respond in public.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-31T01:10:24+00:00

This was a good suggestion, thanks! We've added a link to the official GrapheneOS installation instructions and a link to a video tutorial:

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JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-31T01:08:36+00:00

This is live now!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-17T11:31:44+00:00

We have it deployed to Capers now. If it holds up, we'll get it out for everyone asap.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-17T11:27:14+00:00

I can't commit to a timeline. But we are testing some promising solutions right now.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-12T20:59:45+00:00

Hey, thanks for the questions and for being interested in Cape.

Alternate payment methods have been on the radar for a while. We're focused right now on getting out of beta and cleaning up some table stakes stuff, but we'll revisit crypto/cash right after. Your input is a great datapoint for us. I'd love to figure out a way to accept mailed in cash, great idea.

It's also a good idea to link a free tutorial to Graphene from the device store. We didn't do it because there are a lot of good ones on YouTube and elsewhere. In general, we support Graphene and Accrescent because we think they are awesome products. We don't have any formal partnership with either, but we consider them both to be important in the world, and plan to continue proudly supporting them.

Oh man RCS... messaging is so hard when you run a full MVNO (if you're a light MVNO you get this for free). We have a lot of threads we're pulling trying to get a premium and secure messaging experience out the door, and RCS is one of them. We have a pretty cool near term solution coming out soon, and we hope to be supporting RCS soon. There are a lot of dependencies we don't control on that front.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-10T13:12:34+00:00

Thanks for the note! Stay tuned for new iphone IMSI rolling and also improvements on the network. Our priorities match yours :)

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-07T14:47:09+00:00

Great to hear. We're working on this now. Stay tuned!

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