EzyChat Lite

Many small businesses run sales on one WhatsApp number, on one phone. Someone has to hold that phone. Replies get missed, and nobody knows who is handling which customer.

When the person holding the phone is busy or away, customers wait.

Team inbox services fix this too, but most keep your chats on their own servers.

EzyChat Lite links your number once and lets the whole team answer from their own phone or laptop, from an inbox that runs on your own computer.

Security first

Where your data goes, and how the inbox is protected.

• It runs on your own computer. EzyChat Lite runs on your Windows or Mac computer. There is no EzyChat cloud and no cloud copy of your inbox.
• Your data stays on that computer. Chats, contacts, photos, voice notes, files and nightly backups are kept there. The last seven backups are kept.
• The AI agent and cloud voice-to-text are the exceptions, and both are off unless you turn them on. When the AI agent is on, the messages it answers are sent to OpenAI under your own account. With cloud voice-to-text, customer voice notes are sent to OpenAI to be turned into text. See the AI section below.
• Sign-in is protected. Each person has their own account. Passwords are stored with argon2, sessions are hashed, and repeated wrong passwords lock the account.
• Keys are encrypted. AI keys and tokens are stored encrypted on disk.
• The first admin can only be created on the computer itself. Nobody can set up the inbox from outside.
• You can check all of this. The full source code is public under the MIT licence, so you or your IT partner can see exactly what it does.

What it does

• Link one number by scanning a QR code, the same way you link WhatsApp Web. Recent history is imported.
• Shared inbox. Everyone sees every chat, with a clear owner on each one, open and resolved status, unread counts and search.
• Internal notes inside a chat that customers never see.
• Full messaging. Text, replies, photos, video, voice notes and documents in both directions, group chats, and read ticks.
• Quick replies. Type / to send a saved answer.
• Admin and agent roles. Admins manage settings and members; agents reply.
• On every phone. Team members open the inbox in a browser and can add it to their home screen as an app, with notifications for new messages.
• Reach it where you need it. On the computer, on the office network only, or from anywhere through a Cloudflare tunnel.
• Runs in the background. It can run as a service when the computer starts, with nobody signed in.
• In English, Bahasa Melayu and Simplified Chinese.

The optional AI sales agent

The AI sales agent is in preview. It is an optional member of your team that answers basic customer questions from business information you give it, as uploaded files or text you add. It hands complaints, refunds, orders it cannot carry out and questions it has no facts for to a person, and it closes a chat only after the customer confirms.

It connects to OpenAI in one of two ways:

• Your own OpenAI API key. This is the standard route for a business. OpenAI bills you for usage, separately from any ChatGPT subscription.
• A ChatGPT sign-in, offered as experimental. A ChatGPT subscription is meant for one person's own use. If you choose to run your business's shared AI agent on it, you do so at your own risk and responsibility.

When the AI agent is on, the chats it answers, and any customer photos in them, go to OpenAI.

Customer voice notes can be turned into text on your own computer, with OpenAI's Whisper model (a one-time 360 MB download), or by OpenAI if you choose the cloud option, which sends the voice note to OpenAI. Both are off until an admin turns one on. The cloud option works only with your own OpenAI API key, not a ChatGPT sign-in.

Apart from these, everything stays on your computer.

How it works

1. Install. Download EzyChat Lite for your Windows PC or Mac and open it. Create the admin account on that computer.
2. Link WhatsApp. On your phone, open WhatsApp, go to Linked devices, and scan the QR code.
3. Add your team. Create an account for each person with a temporary password. They change it the first time they sign in.
4. Make it reachable. Choose office network only, or a Cloudflare link so the team can reach it from anywhere.
5. On each phone, open the link, sign in, add it to the home screen and allow notifications.

What it does not do

• One number only. Lite links one WhatsApp number per installation.
• The computer has to stay on. The inbox is served from that computer, so it must be on and online for your team to send and receive. Customer messages still reach WhatsApp on your phone while it is off, and EzyChat Lite catches up when it is back.
• It is not an official WhatsApp product. See the warning at the top of this page.
• It is not for bulk messaging. It is built for people answering real conversations.
• The light CRM is not here yet. Customer profiles, tags, sales stages and follow-up reminders are planned, not available.

Installing on Windows and Mac

The installers are not code-signed yet, so your computer warns you the first time.

• Windows shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.
• macOS says the app "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified". Open the dmg, drag the app to Applications, then right-click (or Control-click) the app and choose Open, then Open again. On recent macOS versions you may need System Settings, Privacy & Security, Open Anyway instead.

Only download the installers from the project's GitHub Releases page.

Requirements

A Windows 10 or 11 (x64) PC, or a Mac with Apple Silicon or Intel, that can stay on. A WhatsApp number to link. For the AI agent, an OpenAI API key or a ChatGPT sign-in.

Who built it

Anchor Sprint built and maintains EzyChat Lite. It started as EzyChat, an internal tool Anchor Sprint built to help businesses manage sales conversations on WhatsApp. EzyChat Lite is a rewrite of it, focused on security and easy setup for small teams.

It is published under the OSS Malaysia organisation on GitHub under the MIT licence, so any business can use it, report problems and contribute fixes. Businesses that come to depend on it and need more can ask Anchor Sprint about EzyChat Enterprise.