Lumi is a place to meet someone new, built safe from the first hello.
Free, anonymous video, audio and text chat with a stranger one to one, or with friends in a room. No account, no ads, no trackers, no data sale, and nothing to install.
What it is
Lumi pairs you with a random person for a video, audio, or text conversation, and lets you skip to meet someone new whenever you like. You can also open a group room, public or private, and bring your friends in with a six-character code. In an adult chat you can pin a video or a track and watch or listen together, in sync; teens get the same when it is switched on for them, with YouTube only. If you do not share a language, type in yours: messages are translated on Lumi's own servers into the language the other person reads, between English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Persian, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Swahili, with the original one tap away. If you liked the person you just talked to, wave when the chat ends: nothing happens unless they wave back within 7 days, and when you both have, you are regulars, a nickname in a short list, with no profile and no names.
The name comes from lumen, light. The idea is a conversation that lights up, not a feed that follows you around.
Who it is for
Anyone aged 13 or over. Adults and teens are kept in separate lanes: a user aged 13 to 17 is only ever matched with other teens, is never monetized, and gets shared video only when Lumi switches it on for teens, YouTube only. Everything below 13 is refused.
How the age check works
Before your first chat you enter your birth year and look at your camera for a moment. Software on Lumi's own servers reads your age group from several photos, not one; no outside company is involved, and no face template is ever stored. The year you type is tested against what the photos show: a year that does not fit is sent back to you to correct, and a year that keeps not fitting is refused for the day. The software decides on its own, and a person looks over its decisions afterwards. If the check cannot read your face you get five retakes, and then it is refused for the day.
More than one check runs on every photo: two separate readers of age that have to agree, a check that a live person is at the camera and not a picture, a video or a screen held up, and the comparison with the year typed. The check also remembers: a birth year that changes from one try to the next is refused for the day. Someone Lumi has known in one age group for more than a week, coming back on a device they have passed a check on, is let in without a new photo.
The photo exists for that check and is kept for 90 days at the latest, on Lumi's own servers only. A photo from a check a person has ruled on may be kept longer, to train Lumi's own age model; no face template is ever stored, and no photo ever leaves Lumi.
Privacy, in plain words
- The person you meet never sees your IP address: audio and video are relayed through Lumi's own servers.
- Lumi does not record your conversations. Automated screening, run on Lumi's own servers, may sample camera frames and check text to catch abuse; what gets flagged is kept as evidence and reviewed by a person, the rest is discarded.
- No ads, no third-party analytics, no data sale, and no cross-site tracking. Lumi is funded by optional adult-only extras, so it has no reason to learn about you.
- Bans stick to the device and the connection, using one-way codes, so a banned person cannot simply come back under a new name.
What it costs
Nothing, to chat. Adults can choose to pay for extras that never change who they meet: Lumi Plus ($4.99 a month or $49.99 a year) for priority matching, a higher video-quality ceiling and cosmetic flair; Room Pro ($9.99 a month) for a persistent room that holds up to 50 people with 6 on camera; one-time cosmetics; and donations.
Who runs it
Lumi is built and run by a small independent team on its own hardware. Every moderation and age-assurance model is self-hosted. Support inside the app reaches a person.
Light up a conversation