Ephemeral by design: chat with zero storage

by Novalink Labs

The default instinct in software is to store everything — profiles, message logs, analytics on every tap. AnnoyChat does the opposite. There are no accounts, and messages disappear the moment you disconnect.

Designing for zero storage

Building for forgetfulness changes the architecture. Conversations live only in memory for the length of a session; pressing Next tears one down and instantly matches a fresh stranger. Nothing is archived, so there’s nothing to leak — and with no profile, there’s no identity to reconstruct.

It also simplifies a lot of hard problems. There’s no history to sync, no account recovery, no long-lived data to secure at rest.

The constraint becomes the product

Without history to scroll or a reputation to protect, the interaction is immediate and low-stakes: press Next, talk to a stranger, move on. What looks like a limitation — no memory — is actually the whole point.

Ephemeral by design turns a constraint into a feature.

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