About Tochato

Tochato is a browser-based chat room site where people talk with strangers one on one. You open tochato.cam, and either the site matches you with one person at random or you choose someone from a live list of who is online. Conversations happen by video, by typed messages, or both. You start as a guest with no sign-up, and it is free to start. That is the whole product. The rest of this page explains why it is shaped that way.

Because the best moments in the old chat rooms were never in the main room. Ask anyone who spent their evenings in one and they will describe the same thing: a noisy lobby that mostly scrolled past, and then one person who replied to something they said, and a private window that stayed open until three in the morning. The lobby was the waiting area. The conversation was the point.

We built the site around that second part. A room with two people in it has properties a crowd cannot have. What you type is read. A question gets an answer. Silence is noticed and somebody fills it. Shy people, who vanish in a busy feed, turn out to be good company when one person is paying attention.

None of this is a new idea. It is what a phone call always was, and what the side window in an old chat room turned into on a good night. We only took away the part where you had to wait in a crowd, hoping to be noticed, before it could happen.

What a busy room feels like, and why so many of the old ones went quiet, is the subject of our guide to popular chat rooms.

Take a random match with one stranger, or look through who is online and open a profile, where you can follow the person, write to them or start a video call. You can talk on camera, type, or both, and typed messages can be translated automatically. All of it runs in a phone or computer browser. The page about how Tochato works shows each of these in the order you meet them.

It suits people who want a conversation more than a community. We had four kinds of visitor in mind when we decided what to build.

A product is defined as much by what it refuses to add. These are the things people sometimes expect from a chat room site that you will not find on this one, and the reasoning behind each.

Real people, one at a time. The person you are matched with or choose from the list is online at that moment. They come from many countries.

We would be misleading you if we claimed every stranger is delightful. Some conversations are friendly, some are dull, and occasionally someone behaves badly, which is what block and report are for. The guide to safe chat rooms is honest about all three.

With coins. Tochato is free to start: you get in without a card, and new visitors receive free matches. People who want more matches than the free ones, or longer calls, buy coins, and that is what keeps the servers running.

We chose this arrangement over the alternatives. A site with no visible price is usually paid for by advertising stacked around the conversation or by trading in what it knows about its visitors. We prefer a price you can see and decline. The page on free chat rooms shows exactly where free stops, and coins explains what they are for.

Three sentences cover most of it. Treat the other person the way you would if they were sitting across a table. Do not ask anyone for money or try to sell them something. Do not capture or share a conversation without the other person's consent.

The full versions are short and written to be read: the community guidelines for behaviour, the terms of service for the agreement between us, and the privacy policy for what information the site keeps.

Because it is one of the small good things the internet was supposed to make easy, and it got harder as everything turned into feeds and followers. Talking to someone you will probably never meet has a freedom to it. You can be curious without consequence, try out an opinion, laugh at yourself, hear about a life nothing like yours.

It does not need to become anything. Some chats last four minutes and are worth having. A few become people you look forward to, and for those there is the follow button. We would count the site a success if you close the tab now and then thinking that the last twenty minutes were better than scrolling would have been. Not every site has to be a network. This one is content to be a door: you open it, there is a person, and what happens next is up to the two of you.

By email. Tochato can be reached at [email protected]. It is one inbox for everything: problems, payments, reports, data requests and business enquiries. The contact page lists what to include so the first reply can be a useful one.