Anony Bean vs WhatsApp: 'Delete for everyone' still leaves a copy
WhatsApp keeps your history, ties you to a phone number, and cannot truly delete a message someone saved. Anony Bean keeps nothing and expires every message in 60 seconds.
WhatsApp is the default messenger for a huge share of the planet, and it earned that place. It is fast, familiar and reliable, and it turns a phone number into a social graph. That last part is exactly the problem when you want to talk to someone for five minutes without handing over a permanent identity.
What WhatsApp gets right
WhatsApp encrypts message contents end to end in transit, so the company cannot read a normal chat. It runs on nearly every phone, it syncs across devices, and it is a genuinely good place to keep years of conversation with family and friends.
Anony Bean does not try to beat WhatsApp at being WhatsApp. It solves a different problem: a room that exists for a few minutes, with people you may never meet again, where nothing is left behind that ties the conversation to you.
The phone number is the identity
To use WhatsApp you need an account, and to get an account you need a phone number. That number is the key to your whole presence. Contacts can discover it, it is how people find you, and it follows you across reinstalls and devices.
Anony Bean asks for none of that. No account, no email, no phone number, nothing to install. You open a browser, the relay assigns the session a random throwaway handle, and you are in a public channel with 3, 9 or 99 seats. When you close the tab, the handle means nothing to anyone.
Delete for everyone still leaves a copy
The most misunderstood button in messaging is the one that promises a message was deleted for everyone. It is a request, it has a time window, and it cannot reach a copy that someone already saved, screenshotted, exported or backed up. Once bytes land on another person's device, no app can pull them back.
Anony Bean removes the argument entirely. Messages, photos, files and polls expire 60 seconds after they are sent. The relay sets the deadline and sweeps expired items every 50 ms, and the recipient's browser independently enforces the same expiry even if the relay stalls. There is no button to trust and no window to race.
| Anony Bean | ||
|---|---|---|
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Phone number required | No | Yes, it is the identity |
| End-to-end encrypted by default | Yes, for all room messages and files | Yes, for message contents in transit |
| Message history kept | No chat database; room state lives in relay memory only | Yes, on your device and in cloud backups |
| Messages expire automatically | Yes, 60 seconds after sending | No, only when someone deletes them |
| Ads and trackers | No analytics SDK, no ad tag, no tracking cookies | No in-chat ads, but a permanent account and metadata |
| Works in the browser with no install | Yes | No, it is an app and a phone number first |
| Identity | Random throwaway handle per session | Your phone number |
What you get inside the room
- No account, no email, no phone number, no install.
- End-to-end encryption on by default for all room text, file bytes and file names, using the documented protocol v3 double-ratchet design and a WASM crypto module. The relay handles ciphertext for room content.
- Photos are stripped of EXIF metadata in the browser before encryption, and file uploads are capped at 2 MiB.
- Room and timeline content lives in the relay's memory only. There is no chat database, so there is no persistent history to hand over.
- Participants never connect directly to each other, so peers do not see each other's IP address.
- Public channels with 3, 9 or 99 seats, secret rooms opened with an invite link and key that expire after 30 minutes, and a Roulette mode that pairs two strangers 1:1 with a truth-or-dare round.
- Reporting and blocking from a person's name in a room's participant list, plus reporting on public timeline posts.
- An optional BEAN wallet, an off-chain in-site credit that is never required for chat.
The caveats, stated plainly
The encryption protocol is documented and regression-tested but has not had an independent cryptographic audit. The site operator and the hosting and CDN providers can still see connection metadata. Screenshots cannot be prevented, and a compromised device, a browser extension or a modified site release can expose plaintext. Blur shield raises the cost of a casual screenshot; it does not stop one. The site is 18+, and accepting the terms is not age verification.
Anony Bean wins for the conversation you do not want tied to your phone number.
If you want a messenger for the people you already know, WhatsApp is excellent at that job and we are not pretending otherwise. If you want to talk to a stranger without becoming a contact, open Anony Bean in a tab and close it when the conversation ends. Nothing to uninstall, because you never installed anything.