Why I Built GhostChat
Every chat tool I tried slowed my site down, tracked my visitors, and cost too much. So I built one that doesn't.
I'm a solo developer. When I needed live chat for my projects, every option was the same story: a 200KB script that tanked my Lighthouse score, cookie banners I didn't want, and pricing that assumed I was an enterprise.
I wanted something radically different. A chat widget that loads instantly, doesn't track anyone, and costs nothing to start. Not free-with-an-asterisk—actually free, forever, for anyone running a single site.
So I built GhostChat from scratch on Cloudflare's edge network. No frameworks, no dependencies, no bloat. The result is the lightest chat widget on the market — 58 times smaller than Intercom, 24 times smaller than tawk.to, and 14 times smaller than Crisp, all measured in August 2026. It loads in milliseconds and works on the slowest connections.
GhostChat is built for anyone who cares about their site's speed and their visitors' privacy but doesn't want to pay enterprise prices for a chat box — small businesses, teams, agencies managing client sites, and solo founders. And because it's just me building it, you get a direct line to the person shipping the fix, not a support queue.
Why $5?
Because that's what it actually costs to run live chat — and an AI assistant — when you build them right. GhostChat runs on Cloudflare's edge network; a chat costs fractions of a cent in compute, and a typical AI reply costs about a third of a cent. That's why the AI plan is one flat $39/mo instead of a metered add-on. No per-seat pricing, no sales overhead, no VC pressure to grow at any cost. $5/mo isn't a loss leader — it's the real price.
Also building Gmailytics — privacy-first Gmail inbox cleanup.