I wanted to add live chat to my WordPress sites without loading a 500KB third-party script. So I built my own.

GhostChat is an open source embeddable

chat widget that runs on Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects.

The client widget is under 10KB. Here's how it works.

The architecture

Widget: Vanilla JS, no framework, ~10KB

Backend: Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects for persistent WebSocket connections

Payments: Stripe for the hosted tier

Self-hostable: Bring your own Cloudflare account

Why Cloudflare Durable Objects?

Durable Objects give you stateful serverless — each chat session

lives in its own DO instance. No Redis, no external DB needed for

real-time state. It's genuinely elegant for this use case.

The "bring your own agent" model

GhostChat supports a webhook architecture so you can pipe messages to any AI agent, your own backend, or a human operator.…