💬 Chatterbox
Self-hosted threaded comments for any site. One script tag, one SQLite file, $69 once.
Chatterbox at a glance
| Price | $69, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Hyvor Talk at $8/mo — roughly $96 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Utilities |
Chatterbox features
📎 One-line embed
A script tag plus a div. Dependency-free vanilla JS (~15 KB) in a shadow DOM — your site's styles never leak in, the widget's never leak out.
🧵 Threaded comments
Replies nested to depth 4 with collapse, relative timestamps, and a 15-minute self-edit/delete window for commenters.
⬆️ Voting with Wilson score
One vote per browser token per comment, server-enforced. Sort by Best, Newest or Oldest.
🛡️ Spam defenses that don't annoy humans
Hidden honeypot, minimum time-to-submit, per-IP rate limiting, link-count threshold — all invisible unless you're a bot. No CAPTCHAs.
👮 Moderation dashboard
Pending/Approved/Spam/Deleted queues, bulk actions, per-site approve-first toggle, email/IP blocklist — plus an RSS feed for moderating from any feed reader.
📧 Reply-email notifications
BYO SMTP; commenters who opt in get emailed on replies, with a signed one-click unsubscribe link.
📦 Disqus import
Upload your XML export, dry-run the counts, commit. Re-importing the same file is a no-op — idempotent by disqus_id.
🔐 Privacy-first & XSS-safe
IPs are salted-hashed before touching disk, never stored raw. Comment bodies render as text nodes only — never string-concatenated HTML.
$69 once — that's the whole pricing page
Hyvor Talk charges $8/mo — roughly $96 a year, every year. Chatterbox is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Chatterbox inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Chatterbox guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/chatterbox-comments-mvp. The $69 buys the packaged installer and updates instead of npm-and-docker setup.
Can I migrate from Disqus?
Yes — upload your Disqus XML export, dry-run to see the counts, then commit. The import is idempotent by disqus_id, so re-running the same file never double-imports.
Do I need a server?
For a public site, yes — a $5 VPS with the included docker compose file covers it. That's the honest trade-off vs Hyvor Talk: they host everything for you, and if you never want to touch a server, a hosted service is genuinely simpler. Chatterbox is for people who'd rather own the data and skip the monthly bill.