For anyone moving to a new country in Europe
Moving is a lot to carry. You don’t have to carry it alone.
Relocat is a small app for the paperwork and the people. It keeps your documents encrypted on your phone, and it shows you others who made the same move — only if you want it to.
The core vault is free. Some things will be rough — we’d love to hear about them.
If this feels overwhelming, you’re in very good company.
Every move runs on documents — passports, contracts, diplomas, bank statements, registrations. They end up scattered across email, chat apps and cloud folders, in places you no longer control.
Millions of people go through this every year. We built Relocat so the people moving are the ones who decide who sees their papers.
- 3.9 millionfirst residence permits issued in the EU in 2025 — one in three for work.Eurostat, 2026
- 4.2 millionpeople moved to the EU from outside it in 2024.Eurostat, 2026
- 68 %of Europeans are highly worried about the protection of their personal data online.European Parliament Eurobarometer, autumn 2025
Sources and fine print
- Eurostat news release, 27 Feb 2026 (non-EU immigrants 2024; excludes 1.5 million moves between EU countries).
- Eurostat, Residence permits – first permits issued 2025 (data extracted 11 Sep 2026). Counts permits, not people.
- European Parliament Autumn 2025 Eurobarometer, QA12, “The protection of personal data online”, share scoring 7–10 on a 1–10 worry scale.
How Relocat helps
Sound familiar?
My passport scan is in WhatsApp, my work contract in Gmail, and my registration paper… somewhere.
Put it all in one place that only you can open. Make a safe for housing, one for work, one for health. Every file is encrypted on your phone before it goes anywhere.
That means we can’t read your documents. Not if we wanted to, and not if someone asked us to.
- Even the names are private.File names and folder names are encrypted too, so “residence-permit.pdf” never reaches our server in readable form.
- No SIM yet? Still works.Your vault opens at the immigration office, on a train or in a basement with no signal. It syncs when you’re back online.
- Only you can recover it.You get a recovery key when you set up. There is no “forgot password” on our side, because we hold nothing that could open your vault.
For the curious: how the encryption works
| XChaCha20-Poly1305 | Encrypts your files and their names. A tampered file won’t open. |
|---|---|
| X25519 | Lets two phones agree on a key without ever sending it — that’s how sharing works. |
| Ed25519 | Signs every request your phone makes. No passwords travel over the wire. |
| HKDF-SHA-256 | Derives a separate key for every purpose, so one key never does two jobs. |
| Argon2id | Makes your recovery key expensive to guess. |
| libsodium | The widely audited library all of this comes from. We don’t invent our own crypto. |
When you switch away from the app, your keys are wiped from memory after 30 seconds, and the screen is covered so documents don’t show in the app switcher.
The landlord wants my passport and three payslips by tonight. Do I really just email them to a stranger?
Send a link that cleans up after itself. They open it in a browser, with no app and no account, and it stops working on its own.
- You choose how long.A guest link expires after 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, and you can limit how many times it opens.
- Didn’t get the flat?Revoke the link with one tap and our server stops serving it.
- Your partner needs the lease too?Share one document or a whole safe with their Relocat account. They keep access until you take it back.
Am I the only one going through this?
You’re not. Often the hardest part isn’t the paperwork, it’s feeling like you’re the only one figuring it out. The Community Map shows you how many people live in your city.
A map of people has to be careful, so we built it that way:
- It’s off until you join.And leaving deletes your profile.
- Your city, never your location.You pick a city from a list. The map never asks for GPS.
- Safety in numbers.A city stays hidden until at least five people there have joined. New profiles only count after 24 hours.
- Checked by a person.If you add a photo, a human moderator approves it before anyone sees it.
- Members only.Signed-in Relocat users can see it. Search engines and the public web can’t.
Being straight with you
What we can see, and what we never can.
To run the service, our server has to know a few things. We’d rather you hear them from us.
What our server knows
- Your email address and the devices you use
- IP addresses, and when you sync
- Who shares with whom — not what
- Roughly how much storage you use, rounded up to fixed sizes
What it never sees
- What’s inside your files
- File names and folder names
- Your keys
- Your exact file sizes
If you join the Community Map, our server stores your nickname, city and photo in plain form, so other members can see them.
Sources
- Relocat client source code (cryptography constants and libsodium) and the in-app Community Map consent screen.
- Why it matters: ENISA Threat Landscape 2026 — ransomware (47.3 %) and data breaches (36 %) made up most financially motivated incidents in 2025. What a server can’t read, it can’t leak.
Planning ahead
What a month looks like in seven cities
Salary and rent decide most moves. These are the official figures where they exist. They come from different years and methods, so we put them side by side and leave the comparing to you.
| City | Typical net salary* | Rent, as officially reported | Everyday costs without rent** |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin | ≈ €2,130 | €15.78 per m², asking (2025) | ≈ €1,060 |
| Amsterdam | ≈ €2,650 | ≈ €2,340 1-bed, centre† | ≈ €1,130 |
| Madrid | ≈ €1,530 | €13.30 per m², existing leases | ≈ €820 |
| Paris | ≈ €1,820 | €26.30 per m², existing leases | ≈ €1,040 |
| Dublin | ≈ €2,690 | €2,301 / month, new tenancy | ≈ €1,090 |
| Milan | ≈ €1,610 | ≈ €1,140 / month, new lease | ≈ €1,050 |
| Warsaw | ≈ €870 | ≈ 4,610 PLN 1-bed, centre† | ≈ €790 |
How to read these numbers
* National median gross monthly earnings of full-time employees in 2022 (Eurostat), converted to net with the 2025 tax rate for a single person without children (OECD). National, not city-level — city salaries are usually higher.
** Food, transport, utilities and phone for one person. Crowdsourced (Numbeo, Oct 2026); no official source exists at this level. † Crowdsourced (Numbeo, Oct 2026). Outside the centre: Amsterdam ≈ €1,740, Warsaw ≈ 3,720 PLN.
Rent sources: Berlin IBB Wohnungsmarktbericht 2025 · Madrid SERPAVI 2025 (2023 tax data, below today’s asking rents) · Paris OLAP 2025 · Dublin RTB Rent Index Q1 2026 · Milan OMI, Agenzia delle Entrate, Q4 2025.
Data as of October 2026, updated once a year. Know a better official source? Tell us.
A few things we will never do
We’re a very small team, and this is a product we wanted for ourselves. So here is what you can hold us to:
- Sell your data, or share it with advertisers or data brokers.
- Show you ads.
- Build a backdoor: we can’t open your vault, so nobody can.
The Relocat app is free software under the GNU GPL v3 or later, so anyone can read how it handles your data. Our server is our own.
— the Relocat team
Come help us build it.
Relocat is in open beta. Some things will break — when they do, tell us. What you say decides what we build next.