Create a room in 2 seconds. Burn it in 1.
BurnChat has no onboarding flow, no tutorial popup, no welcome email. But here's a quick rundown of everything you can do — it's shorter than you'd think.
Making a room
Go to burnchat.io. You'll see one button that says "Create a room." Click it. That's it — you now have a private room with a unique link like burnchat.io/k3m7xp2v.
You'll get asked for a nickname. Type whatever you want. It's not tied to anything. You could be "dave" one time and "toaster" the next. We don't check and we don't save it.
Before you create the room, there's a checkbox that says "add a room password." Tick it, type a password, and now anyone who clicks the link will need that password to get in. Useful if you're dropping the link somewhere semi-public and only want certain people to actually join.
Sharing the link
Once you're in the room, hit the "copy link" button in the top right. Send that link to whoever you want to talk to — text it, email it, scribble it on a napkin, whatever works. Anyone with the link (and the password, if you set one) can join.
People who join late will see the last 100 messages so they have context. They won't see anything before that because anything before that is already gone from memory.
Sending messages and images
Type in the box at the bottom and hit send. Or press Enter. You know how chat works.
There's a "+" button next to the message box — that's for images. Tap it, pick a photo. BurnChat will automatically shrink and compress it in your browser before sending, so even a massive 15MB phone photo gets squeezed down to a few hundred KB. The image never touches our disk. It travels through memory just like text messages and dies the same way.
Locking a room after it's created
Changed your mind and want to add a password after people have joined? Hit the "lock" button in the header. Set a password and it'll take effect immediately — anyone new who tries to join will need it. Everyone already in the room sees a message that a password was set.
Want to remove it later? Same button, leave the password blank, done.
Burning it all down
This is the part people actually came for.
The red "burn" button is in the top right corner. Any person in the room can press it — not just the creator. You'll get a confirmation popup because we're not monsters. Confirm it, and here's what happens:
Every message — text and images — gets wiped from memory. Every person in the room gets disconnected. The room ID stops existing. There is no undo. There is no "recently deleted" folder. It's gone. The server's garbage collector reclaims the memory within milliseconds.
After the burn, everyone sees a screen confirming the room was destroyed, with a counter showing how many rooms have been burned total. One click to make a new room if you want to start fresh.
Auto-burn: destroy the room when everyone leaves
There's a button in the header called auto-burn. It does exactly what it sounds like — when the last person leaves the room, instead of sitting around for 30 seconds waiting to see if someone comes back, the room burns immediately. Messages wiped, room gone, no delay.
When you toggle it on, it turns red and shows "auto-burn: on" with a small hint that says "room burns when empty." Everyone in the room sees a system message saying you enabled it. Toggle it off and it goes back to the normal 30-second cleanup window.
This is useful when you want to be absolutely sure the conversation doesn't linger in memory for even half a minute after everyone disconnects. Maybe you're sharing something sensitive and you want the room to self-destruct the instant the conversation is over. Hit auto-burn, close your tabs, done.
What happens if you just... leave?
If everyone leaves the room without burning it, we wait 30 seconds in case someone accidentally closed their tab. If nobody comes back, the room and everything in it gets deleted automatically. Same result as burning, just a bit slower.
And if somehow a room stays active for 24 hours straight (maybe you forgot about it), it auto-expires and cleans itself up. Nothing sticks around forever here.
That's it
There's no settings page. No profile to configure. No notification preferences. Open, chat, burn, gone. We kept it simple on purpose.
Faster than reading about it
Seriously. By the time you finished this article you could have already created, used, and burned three rooms.
Create a room