FREE & OPEN SOURCE

Live typing chat.
Open-source. Private.

Watch every keystroke appear in real time — end-to-end encrypted,
no accounts, no cloud storage. Just a wire between two people.

Download for Windows ♥ Sponsor on GitHub

Windows 10 / 11 · Free forever

SEMABUZZ

ALICE

–□✕

ALICE

Your buzz is live — code: X7K2QP

Waiting for someone to join…

✓ Bob connected & secured

Bob ›

BOB

Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.

🔐

End-to-End Encrypted

Every session generates fresh keys on both devices using ECDH P-256. Messages are locked with AES-256-GCM before they leave your machine. The relay sees only opaque bytes.

⚡

Live Typing Preview

Watch every keystroke appear in real time as the other person types. The BuzzIndicator filament pulses with their activity — you always know when someone is composing.

📎

File Transfer

Send files directly through your relay. The recipient approves or declines. Every transfer is SHA-256 verified on arrival — what was sent is what arrives.

✏️

Shared Whiteboard

Open a live drawing board alongside your chat. Both sides draw simultaneously and see each other's strokes in real time. Stays open while you keep talking.

🌐

Walk Web

Push a URL to the other person instantly — a clickable link appears in their chat pane without any copy-paste. Share a page in one click.

🎭

Profiles & Themes

Create named profiles with handles and avatars. Switch between a full library of themes. Set your status — Available, Away, or Busy — and a custom status message.

Up and running in three steps.

One person creates a buzz

Click CREATE A BUZZ. A unique 6-character code appears — good for this session only.

→

Share the code

Send the code by any means — text, email, a sticky note. The other person types it into the Join a Buzz box.

→

You're live

Both sides are connected and encrypted. Type, send files, draw, buzz. Close the app and the session is gone forever.

Run your own relay.

SemaBuzz requires a relay to connect peers — you or your peer runs one. It's open-source (MIT), ships as a single self-contained binary, and runs anywhere: a VPS, a home server, or a free cloud instance. The relay is a blind pass-through — it can never read your messages.

↓ Windows x64 ↓ Linux x64 View Source

./SemaBuzz.Relay · Port 7171 · ~10 MB · Linux x64 / ARM64 / Windows · All downloads

Where to host

🚂 Railway Deploy in one click from GitHub. Free trial credit included, no credit card to start. Try Railway →

🏠 Home server Run the binary on any PC or Raspberry Pi. Forward port 7171 on your router. Setup guide →

🪂 Fly.io Free tier — 3 shared VMs, always on, Docker-native. Best free option. fly.io →

Download SemaBuzz

Free. No installer telemetry. No account required.

Download for Windows v1.0.0 · Windows 10/11 · 64-bit

Requires a self-hosted relay — you or your peer runs one. Open-source under AGPL-3.0.

Built for the era when chat felt personal.

I grew up on PowWow, ICQ, and MSN Messenger — there was something magical about that era of direct, personal chat that modern apps have completely lost. I built SemaBuzz to bring that feeling back.

You'll find a lot of the classics: URL Walk, a shared whiteboard, file transfer, and rich status changes with custom status messages — things PowWow and ICQ fans will recognize instantly.

Then we added our own spin: every session generates fresh encryption keys via token-based E2E chat, with a private relay that literally cannot read your messages. And the live-typing preview — that flowing filament line showing characters as they're typed — is our love letter to what made those old programs feel so alive.

Fully open-source (AGPL-3.0). — Bill, Skynr Labs

Live typing chat.Open-source. Private.

Everything you need.Nothing you don't.