ROOKS

Chat. Meet. Call. Collaborate. Rooks brings your team together in one calm workspace — on a server you own. No accounts, no ads, no per-seat fees.
REAL-TIME CHAT AUDIO & VIDEO SCREEN SHARING SELF-HOSTED NO ACCOUNTS NO ADS

In development · Web · Self-hosted

Rooks: a chat workspace with contacts, presence and a conversation in progress

One workspace for the whole team

Chat that keeps up

Message teammates one-to-one with live presence, so you always know who's around. Conversations persist and reload the moment you reconnect.

Meet face to face

Start an audio or video meeting straight from any conversation. Calls are peer-to-peer over WebRTC, so media goes between people — not through a third party.

Share your screen

Present a slide, a build or a tricky bug in one click, and switch back to your camera when you're done.

Everyone in one place

See who's online at a glance. When someone joins or leaves, presence updates instantly across the team.

Yours to host

Run the whole thing on a box you control. No cloud dependency, no vendor in the middle, no seat you have to buy.

Small and open

A compact Deno server and a static client — easy to read, easy to run, easy to make your own.

How it works

Run the server

One small Deno server hosts the client and relays messages between people.

Open the client

Teammates visit the address and enter a display name. That's the whole sign-up.

Talk, meet, share

Chat one-to-one, start an audio or video call, or share your screen — all in the same window.

Built for teams, without the overhead

A typical team suiteRooks
Where it runsTheir cloudYour server
Sign-upAccounts and profilesJust a display name
PricingMonthly, per seatNo per-seat fees
Ads & trackingOftenNone
Your conversationsOn their serversOn yours
CallsRouted through a servicePeer-to-peer WebRTC

Rooks is early. It is honest about that — chat, presence, calls and screen sharing work today; a fuller collaboration suite is on the roadmap.

Run it yourself

Questions

Do we need accounts?

No. You enter a display name and you're in — no email, no password, no profile to fill out.

Where do our messages live?

On the server you run. There is no Cherishvale-hosted service and no third party holding your conversations.

Does it work offline?

No — and it doesn't pretend to. Rooks is for real-time collaboration, so it needs the server reachable. (Our other apps, like Planetary Explorer and Resera, are the fully offline ones.)

What powers the calls?

WebRTC. Audio, video and screen share connect peers directly, so the media itself doesn't pass through a central server.

On privacy

Rooks runs on your infrastructure. Messages are relayed by the server you host; calls are peer-to-peer. There are no ads, no analytics and nothing phoning home to us — because there is nowhere for it to phone.