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TruChat: Anonymous Real-Time Chat Platform

An anonymous, account-free chat platform with a ten-game real-time arcade and an earn-only rewards economy. Built on a simple bet: strip away every barrier between wanting to talk to someone and actually talking to them, without giving up the safety rails an anonymous surface needs.

Solo Product Owner and Architect Jul 2026 to Present
Commits shipped
633
API routes
87
SQL migrations
119
Arcade games
10

The Challenge

Most chat products force a trade-off between trust and friction. Demanding identity up front kills casual use; offering anonymity with no safety rails kills trust. The product needed instant, no-signup conversation alongside server-enforced safety and a monetization model that could not be gamed by simply paying for status.

My Contribution

Set the safety and monetization philosophy: Google-only auth, a one-way non-purchasable points economy, and contact-info sharing blocked server-side rather than moderated after the fact

Directed the build across five connected systems: 1-on-1 and random chat, rooms, a ten-game arcade, the TruPoints economy, and a full moderation and admin stack

Retired the original puzzle platform in favour of a purpose-built arcade, and ran a Material Design 3 redesign plus a mobile pass that reclaimed 108px of chrome

Directed dedicated audit passes across accessibility and mobile UX that replaced guessed estimates with verified, code-level findings

Prioritized and reviewed all 633 commits, holding the i18n rollout back from a shortcut that would have cost the marketing pages their server-rendered SEO

Results

427

i18n keys at full parity across 6 languages on core product surfaces

165

Postgres row-level-security policies enforced universally across the schema

22

SEO-driven public pages built as an organic-discovery surface distinct from the app

5

connected product systems shipped: chat, rooms, arcade, economy and moderation

AI Collaboration

Claude Code was used as an agentic pair-programmer rather than a one-shot code generator: reading the existing codebase, proposing implementations, running the project's own test and lint tooling, and iterating against feedback. Product direction, architecture calls and final review stayed with me.

What I did

  • Product scope, safety posture and the anti-pay-to-win monetization stance
  • The decision to retire the original puzzle platform and build a purpose-built arcade
  • Prioritizing security and accessibility hardening passes between feature pushes
  • Holding the public marketing pages back from client-side translation to protect their SEO rendering
  • Review and merge of every change before it shipped

What AI executed

  • Implementing API routes, SQL migrations and UI components to spec
  • Writing and extending the test suite across arcade anti-cheat, authorization and i18n parity
  • Large mechanical passes such as i18n string extraction across hundreds of call sites
  • Directed audit sweeps that reported actual findings from the live codebase, including one that corrected an inflated estimate of roughly 170 unlabelled buttons down to a verified 5 across all 279 buttons

Work Completed

Chat core: direct, random and rooms

Three-column Material Design 3 shell, plus a mobile pass reclaiming 108px of chrome.

Shipped

Ten-game arcade

Energy system, per-game leaderboards and anti-cheat run validation.

Shipped

TruPoints economy

Earn-only by design, with a redemption catalog and admin adjustment tooling.

Shipped

Security hardening

Universal RLS, header hardening, dependency CVE patching and env fail-fast.

Shipped

i18n across chat, rooms, arcade and rewards

427 keys at full parity across six languages.

Shipped

i18n across premium and admin console

Still English-only; scoped as the next translation pass.

In Progress

Localized public marketing pages

Waiting on locale routing so server-rendered SEO survives the rollout.

Planned

Friends UI, gift storefront, notification center

Backend groundwork exists; the front-end surfaces are not yet built.

Planned

Admin 2FA and staging environment

Flagged as operational hardening for the next phase.

Planned

Challenges and Solutions

An anonymous, account-free product is inherently harder to keep safe, and moderation alone always arrives after the harm.

Solution

Solved architecturally: contact-info sharing is rejected server-side with a 422 rather than flagged after the fact, so the unsafe action never completes.

Premium status needed to feel earned rather than bought, without abandoning monetization entirely.

Solution

Removed the payment processor outright and rebuilt Premium access around the points economy: a deliberate, harder-to-reverse product bet.

Wiring the public marketing pages to client-side translation would have shipped six languages quickly, but stripped those pages of the server-rendered output their organic search traffic depends on.

Solution

Held the rollout rather than taking the fast, damaging shortcut, and scoped proper locale routing so the marketing surface can be translated without losing its SEO rendering.

Chat on mobile lost too much vertical space to app chrome, leaving too little room for the conversation itself on the devices most people actually used.

Solution

Ran a mobile UX overhaul that reclaimed 108px of chrome and rebuilt the shell around Material Design 3, so the message list gets the screen instead of the interface.

Technical Implementation

Frontend

Next.js 16 (App Router)React 19TypeScript 5Serwist PWA

Backend

87 API routesDedicated lib layer for business logicZod schemas at every API boundary

Data and auth

Supabase (Postgres)165 row-level-security policiesGoogle OAuthCLI-managed migrations

Platform

Upstash Redis rate limitingVercel with scheduled cronSentry across client, server and edge

Safety

Server-side contact-info blockingDOMPurify sanitizationHMAC-signed cookies with constant-time comparison

Testing

VitestTesting LibraryAnti-cheat, authorization and i18n parity suites
Available Now

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