I built a chat app that forgets 🔥

There's a kind of conversation that doesn't belong in WhatsApp. 💬

You need to send someone a document. Or say something that shouldn't sit in a thread forever. Or talk to a person you'd rather not add to your contacts. Every option feels wrong — message them somewhere that keeps a copy of everything, email them and leave a permanent paper trail, or dig out a file-sharing site that looks like it hasn't been touched since 2009.

So I built CipherDrop. Open a room, share the ID, talk, delete. 🗑️

Nobody signs up. Nobody hands over a phone number or an email. And when the room goes, it takes everything with it.

🔗 Try it: https://cipherdrop.saadbhatti888.workers.dev

🤔 Who is this actually for?

Not everyone needs this. But if any of these sound familiar, it was built for you:

• 📄 Sending a document to someone you barely know. A contract, an invoice, a CV. You need it to arrive — you don't need it living in a chat thread for the next five years.
• 🧑‍💻 Freelancers and clients. A quick channel for one project, closed the day it ships.
• 🛒 Buying or selling something online. Talk to a stranger without giving them a way to reach you afterwards.
• 🏥 Anything sensitive but ordinary. A medical result, a bank detail, a password. Things you'd rather not leave sitting in someone's message history.
• 🎓 Group work with people you'll never speak to again. One room, everyone in, delete when done.
• 🚪 Just wanting a door you can close. Sometimes that's the whole reason.

⚡ How it works

Create a room and you get an ID. Send it to one person or a whole group — text it, WhatsApp it, read it down the phone. However you like.

Rooms come in two shapes:

👥 Just the two of us — you approve one person, and the room is then closed. A third person who somehow gets hold of the ID is simply told the room is full. No waiting list, no peeking in.

🌐 Group — anyone holding the ID walks straight in.

When someone knocks on a private room, a card appears over your chat with their name and two buttons: let them in, or don't. They're inside a second later, no refreshing on either end. ✨

🎁 What's inside

💬 Everything arrives instantly — text, photos, video, documents and voice notes, with no refreshing and no waiting.

✅ Read receipts you can trust — one tick when it's sent, two when it's delivered, two blue when it's actually been read.

😂 Reactions — tap a message, pick an emoji, tap again to take it back.

🎙️ Voice notes done properly — tap the mic and you get a real recorder with a timer and bars that move with your voice. Bin it or send it. Playback is a waveform you can scrub through, not a grey browser box.

📎 Attachments that don't bury the conversation — a photo arrives as a neat chip rather than a wall of image. Tap to open it full screen, with download and close right there. Videos open in a player. Documents show you the name, type and size, with one button to save them.

📤 Uploads you can watch happen — the message appears the moment you pick a file, with a live percentage, then settles into the real thing.

🔒 A lock, when you want one — flip it on, choose a key, and your message is scrambled in your own browser before it's sent anywhere. The other person sees "Locked" until they tap it and enter the same key. Share that key any way you like — out loud is fine.

🧹 Delete, and mean it — one press removes the room, every message in it, and every file anyone uploaded. Anyone still inside is sent home immediately.

📱 It installs like an app — open it on your phone, tap install, and it lives on your home screen with its own icon and no address bar in sight.

🛡️ How safe is it, really?

Fair question, and I'd rather answer it plainly than hide behind buzzwords.

Rooms are genuinely closed. 🚪 Knowing a room's address isn't enough to get into it. If you weren't let in, you see a locked door — not the conversation.

Nobody can pretend to be someone else. 🎭 Your name in a room is fixed the moment you're approved, and two people can't use the same name in one room.

Nothing is broadcast to the open internet. 📡 Live messages travel on a private channel that has to be unlocked for each person individually.

You can scramble a message before it leaves your device. 🔐 Use the lock and only someone with your key can read it — including in the unlikely event anyone ever got to the storage behind the app.

Deleted means deleted. 🗑️ Not hidden, not archived. The messages and the files both go.

No account means nothing to leak. 👤 There's no email, no password, no phone number, because there's nothing to sign up for.

And now the honest part 🙂

I'd rather undersell this than have someone trust it too far.

CipherDrop is not Signal. It's built with care, but it's a young app made by one person, and it hasn't been reviewed by a security team. Messages you don't lock are stored normally on the way through. And anyone who gets your room ID can ask to join — so treat that ID like a password and only send it to the person you mean.

For a document you'd rather not leave lying around, a conversation you want to end cleanly, or a chat with someone you'd prefer not to keep in your contacts — it does that job well. ✅

If your physical safety depends on a conversation staying private, use a tool that's been audited by people whose full-time job that is. 🙏

🚀 What's next

Rooms currently sit there until someone deletes them. Automatic clean-up is next — rooms that quietly disappear after a day, or after a couple of hours of silence, files included. Then a Play Store version. 📲

If you try it and something feels off, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. 💭

Built by Saad Ahmad — isaadahmad.com

🔗 Try CipherDrop: https://cipherdrop.saadbhatti888.workers.dev