Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to New project for on-demand chat rooms
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
UrShoutbox is a platform for creating on-demand real-time chat rooms around trending topics or personal interests. Users can generate a room on the main site and share it via social networks or email to discuss topics… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. New project for on-demand chat rooms launched in 2014; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
I previously did a Show HN late Dec 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672 That was a great experience and in the past year I continued to develop the site to bring it to a level of stability and maturity that I felt necessary for it to have a chance to succeed. Sqwok is all about answering the question: Can we have better open conversations on the internet? I wasn’t satisfied with the existing means of discussing topics such as culture, history, politics, and technology through threaded comments, and was simultaneously impressed with Slack bringing the IRC…
2022 · sqwok.im · its alternatives →
- 2
Foxchat▲275Best Intercom alternative for startups and indie hackers
Feb 2026 · foxchat.dev · its alternatives →
- 3
- 4
- 5HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
- 8
Create a chat, copy the URL, paste it wherever you want. Perfect for those that would like to continue a discussion on a social network without having to sign up for anything. http://beta.mss.gs/#!/page/home
2012 · beta.mss.gs · its alternatives →
- 9
- 10HN
Although the page itself is more just fun to have made and look at (I like the flip sound), the fun part is how I made it to verify the (and I hate to say it) vibe host service I've been working on. The recent flip board back and forth's on Twitter (X) are what inspired me. The idea here is that people (like me or you) can create something neat like this, and others can remix it, change it and publish their own version. This is that all in action and it worked great. I wrote a blog about it (the blog is dogfooding, it's just an app hosted on quickish that uses the built in db lib). For the…
Jun 2026 · popflame.quickish.space · its alternatives →
- 11
Scriptmine▲86I built this for myself. I make videos, and my biggest bottleneck is figuring out what to say to my audience without staring at a blank page. So I built Scriptmine: a tool that listens to Reddit conversations in my niche, finds high-signal topics, and turns them into scripts. How it works: - Track subreddits and discussions relevant to a niche - Rank topics by engagement/momentum - Generate a hook/body/CTA draft in a chosen voice/format
Feb 2026 · scriptmine.ai · its alternatives →
- 12
Creating Real Time chat with Laravel, Vue and Pusher - ahmedkhan847/chatwithlaravelandvue
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13IL
Hello HN, I want to share something that I worked on for quite a while as my side project - www.heahy.com an IRC like chat where you can share various media and even record yourself (using web MediaRecorder api). Here is a thread with short explanation on how it works: https://www.heahy.com/channel/homepage/thread/3900adb9e441a09abc757461 I am looking for any feedback and if you have any ideas, advice or questions I am eager to hear it here or on heahy!
2020 · its alternatives →
- 14
Chat with millions of people. Meet new people and enjoy the most fun way of chatting :)
2012 · connected2.me · its alternatives →
- 15HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010 · hackerlunch.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Some of my best ideas were getting lost inside long ChatGPT conversations. I built this tool to turn raw chats into clean, readable posts that can be shared publicly and indexed, without rewriting everything by hand. It’s meant for people who think a lot but don’t enjoy long-form writing, and want their ideas to compound instead of disappearing in chat logs. Happy to answer questions about how it works or why I built it.
Jan 2026 · thinkinpublic.app · its alternatives →
- 17MF
Please have a look at www.socialeaks.com and tell me what you think. This is my first adventure in coding (my background is not CS). I started learning rails about a month ago via railstutorial.org. When I finished that, I felt the best way to continue learning would be to just build an app from scratch. I came up with this concept while observing how crazy the world had gone over WikiLeaks. I thought this was a funny idea. I also thought it would be fun to build! So, here I am. I built this in rails 3 and it is currently living on Heroku. It took me about two weeks to code, doing just about…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 18
I recently received access to develop and use ChatGPT plugins, and embarked on a project to build a Hacker News integration as a learning exercise. My goal was to enable retrieval of content from HN to answer questions and produce insights in conversations with ChatGPT. I documented my journey in this blog post, which will hopefully be helpful to other plugin developers or anyone looking to learn more about embeddings. You can try the experience even if you don't have plugin access on ChatGPT through the demo on hn.kix.in - it's a loose approximation but should give you a sense of what's…
2023 · kix.in · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN! Few months ago I've shared a new kind of markdown editor that we (a team of three from the Czech Republic) have been working on (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144801). What resonated with folks the most was Kraa's unique ‘real-real-time’ chat feature. We have now acted on this feedback, improved the chat features, and made what we call Kraa Trees. Trees allow anyone to create a light-weight community / chat channels. It would be a stretch to call it an alternative to Discord, yet, but we hope that the frictionless nature of Trees will make them…
Apr 2026 · kraa.io · its alternatives →
- 20
Hi everyone, We are Nico and Leo. We built an AI-powered chatbot builder designed to make it easy for anyone to create a ChatGPT-like chatbot in just minutes. If you're interested in trying it out, we offer a FREE plan that allows users to create and customize their own chatbot. It is ideal for people looking to add a support chatbot to their website or summarize complex information. Here are some of the key features: - Upload documents (PDFs, docs, txt, csv) or input a website URL, and we'll extract the information and build a chatbot that can answer questions related to the content. -…
2023 · instantanswers.xyz · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi HN, I’m building Hideout, a small web-based chat app inspired by Discord-style rooms, but stripped down to the minimum. I started this project because I was curious about one specific problem: how do you make a real-time chat app feel alive with very few users? Right now: Hideout has ~35 users One main room Text chat only No moderation tools, bots, or servers to configure The app is intentionally simple. When someone joins, they’re dropped directly into the active room so conversations aren’t fragmented. The hardest issue so far has been the cold start problem — users joining at different…
2025 · joinhideout.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 22AN
I’ve developed an application that reimagines chat rooms by integrating them with a world map. Each user can claim a rectangular piece of land on the map, referred to as a "banner." Users within close proximity are grouped into a chat room by the app. The banner’s size can expand or shrink based on the density of users in the area and the number of coins in the user’s account. Key Features: Real-World Interaction Model: Users are pseudo-anonymous, akin to real-world interactions. Coin balance determines user size and visibility ("stature"), while endorsements and other activities form a…
2024 · beescribe.com · its alternatives →
- 23
This is a userscript that you can use with Tampermonkey, or paste it to JS console. I generated it with o1-preview, simply by pasting the HTML source of a HN page to the prompt and asking it to make a comment updating script. And it worked flawlessly — great job, OpenAI! I'm impressed. What a time to be alive! The prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/66eb36c5-a55c-8005-9ee1-d42770297d... The script fetches new comments every 10 seconds and inserts them to a proper place in the DOM, highlighting them with a nice color. With this script, HN feels like a realtime chat in busy…
2024 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Quickpost▲10Hi HN, I’ve been building a small social network where the feed is always chronological — newest posts come first, always. It’s not 100% algorithm-free (there’s still basic filtering to avoid spam or abuse), but the core idea is that every user has a real chance to be seen, even with zero followers. It’s lightweight, works well on mobile, and supports both posts and comments. Most of the content is currently in Portuguese, since it started with a Brazilian audience, but the interface is mostly language-neutral. I’d love any feedback on the concept, UX, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · qqpost.netlify.app · its alternatives →
Also compare
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →