the short version
your messages never leave your laptop
There is no account, no upload, no server that sees your chat. The whole thing runs inside this browser tab and forgets everything when you close it.
nothing is uploaded
The file you drop in is opened by code running in this tab, the same way a photo you open on your computer never goes anywhere.
it works offline
Turn off your wifi and try it. Everything still works, which is the easiest proof there is that nothing is being sent.
it forgets on close
Nothing is written to your browser storage. Close the tab and the numbers are gone. Reopening starts from scratch.
no account, no tracking
Nothing to sign up for, no analytics watching what you do, no cookies following you around.
what happens to each thing you give it
your chat.db
Read in the tab and kept in memory while you are using the site. The reader is a copy of sqlite, the same database software your Mac already uses, compiled to run in a browser. It never gets sent anywhere, and it is dropped the moment you close the tab.
your messages
Used for two things: counting reactions, and filling the hall of fame with the funniest ones. The whole chat is read on your machine and never stored anywhere.
A share link is the one exception, and it is a deliberate one. The handful of winning messages ride along in it so that everyone who opens the link sees the same results you do. Details below.
your contacts, if you hand them over
Optional, and only there so you do not have to type names next to phone numbers. The vCard is matched against the numbers in the chat and then dropped with everything else. Skipping it works fine.
the share link
This is the one thing you can send to other people, so it is worth knowing exactly what is in it.
The link carries the names, the counts, and the winning messages. Who sent how many, who got how many reactions, who reacted to whom, and up to ten of the most reacted to messages, trimmed to 200 characters each.
Everything else stays put. The rest of your conversation, every message that did not make the top ten, and the database itself never go anywhere.
All of it is packed into the part of the link after the # sign, which browsers never send to a website. So even the machine serving this page cannot see what is in a link you share.
One exception, on purpose. The name of the group chat is put in front of the #, which means the server does see it. That is what lets a chat app show the group's name on the link preview instead of a blank card. It is only the name. No counts, no messages, nobody's number.
Whoever opens it sees exactly what you see, hall of fame included. That is the point: one person in the chat makes it, and everybody gets the same thing.
a fair warning
The site is careful with your data. It is not careful with your friends' feelings.
A share link tells everyone who opens it exactly how many people laugh at each of them, and who never laughs back. It also carries a handful of real messages from the chat. That is the entire point, and it is also a real thing to hand to a group of people.
Send it to the chat it came from. Anyone with the link sees what is in it, so posting one somewhere public means posting those messages too.
if you would rather check than trust
Reasonable. Three ways, easiest first.
- Pull your wifi. Load the page, disconnect, then drop your file in. If it still works, nothing is being sent.
- Watch the network tab. Open your browser's developer tools, go to Network, and use the site. Everything loads at the start and nothing goes out after.
- Read the code. It is a handful of plain files with no build step. Right click, view source, and the whole thing is there.