Web Chat
Open-source · Cloudflare-powered

Real-time chat rooms, running at the edge

A serverless web chat and calling app. Share text and images, search full room history, and join browser voice calls - all with low latency from the Cloudflare edge. Self-hostable and free.

Get StartedStar on GitHub
Web Chat screenshot showing real-time chat rooms, voice calls and room history search

Everything a chat room needs

Built for fast, reliable conversations - from quick text to multi-party voice, with the durability you'd expect from a hosted product.

Real-time text & images
Send text and images instantly in shared rooms. Reliable, idempotent delivery - no duplicate messages, no lost images after a refresh.
Browser voice calls
Join multi-party voice calls right in the browser. No installs, no plugins - powered by WebRTC and a managed SFU.
Full room history search
Search the complete text history of a room with stable snapshots and context windows around older matches.
Stickers & replies
Save any image as a sticker for quick reuse, quote earlier messages with reply snapshots that render on every device.
Serverless & self-hostable
Runs on Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, D1 and R2. Fully open-source - deploy your own instance in minutes.
Automatic data cleanup
Inactive rooms expire after 30 days and unreferenced images are reclaimed after a safety window, keeping storage lean.

Powered by an edge-native stack

No single-region origin server to warm up. State, storage and compute sit together on Cloudflare's global network.

Edge compute
Requests are handled at the Cloudflare edge closest to the user, cutting round-trip latency versus a single-region origin.
Durable Objects
Each room is a strongly-consistent Durable Object holding its live state and SQLite history - no separate state server.
Built for reliability
Idempotent message acceptance and image-reference protection mean retries and refreshes stay consistent end to end.

A different kind of chat app

Typical hosted chat
  • Runs in one or two cloud regions
  • Needs a long-running state server
  • History search limited or missing
  • Closed-source, hard to self-host
Web Chat
  • Served from the Cloudflare edge worldwide
  • State co-located in Durable Objects
  • Full room history search built in
  • Open-source and self-hostable

Frequently asked questions

What is Web Chat?▾

Web Chat is a free, open-source real-time chat and calling app. You create shared rooms, exchange text and images, and join browser-based voice calls - no app install required beyond a quick sign-in.

Do I need to install anything?▾

No. Web Chat runs entirely in your browser. Voice calls use WebRTC and a managed SFU, so you join a room and start talking without plugins or desktop software.

How do I get started?▾

Click "Get Started" to sign in, then create a room and share its link. Anyone with the link can join the same room from any device.

Why is it fast?▾

It runs on Cloudflare Workers, so traffic is served from the edge location nearest each user. Room state lives in a Durable Object with co-located SQLite, avoiding a separate database round trip for every message.

Where is my data stored?▾

Room metadata lives in Cloudflare D1, room state and history in Durable Object SQLite, and images in Cloudflare R2 (or any S3-compatible store). Everything stays inside the Cloudflare ecosystem you deploy to.

Can I self-host it?▾

Yes. Web Chat is fully open-source and ships with deployment scripts for Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2 and Durable Objects. Clone the repository and follow the README to run your own instance.

How long are messages and images kept?▾

Messages remain for as long as their room exists. Rooms with no user activity for 30 consecutive days are deleted, and images no longer referenced by any message are reclaimed after a 24-hour safety window.

Can I search old messages?▾

Yes. Each room has full text-history search with stable result snapshots and context windows around older matches, so you can find and reopen past conversations in place.

Start chatting in seconds

Free, open-source, and running at the edge. Create your first room now.

Get StartedView source