Chatrandom Review: Random Video Chat, Free

Chatrandom pays me nothing, so if you want something I can stand behind: Chatmate (10 min of private for $50). Full comparison in the calculator.

Nothing here is metered, so the question this page has to answer is not what a minute costs. It is whether choosing which country your strangers come from is worth twenty dollars a month.

ChatRandom sells two things and nothing else: a week for $6.99 and a month for $19.99. There is no wallet, no token price and no per-minute rate, which makes it the simplest pricing on this site to describe and the easiest to check before you spend anything.

The random chat itself is free and always has been. What the plan buys is a profile you can fill in, your social links, and the ability to choose where in the world you are matched. Features rather than access, and certainly not metered time. So the decision is not “how many minutes can I afford”, it is “is picking the country worth twenty dollars a month”, and you can spend a while on the free tier working out the answer.

Buying by the month rather than by the week saves about 28%, because four weekly charges come to $27.96. There is no longer plan, which its sister site Chatspin does have, at $59.99 for six months.

That sister site is the part worth knowing. ChatRandom, Flingster and Shagle are one company and all three charge exactly $6.99 and $19.99. Chatspin comes out of the same stable and charges $4.99 and $14.99 for a very similar product. I have no interest in which of them you pick, since none of these four pays me anything, so the useful sentence is simply that three of the four have agreed on a price and the fourth undercuts them by a quarter.

Both ChatRandom figures are my own, read off its upgrade page in 2022. Nobody has been back to that checkout since, which is what the low mark next to them says.

The oldest of the four siblings, and the broadest

ChatRandom is the oldest of the four siblings and the broadest. It is not adults-only, the population is closer to general-purpose random chat than to anything on the cam side of this directory, and there are themed rooms and group chats alongside the one-to-one roulette.

The free tier is the product for most people, and no card is involved at any point. When a card is involved, what this category charges is a period of access on most of these sites and a block of minutes on the rest. What the plan adds is two things the other three siblings do not both sell: a profile with your social links on it, and the country filter. The profile is the giveaway. It is the only one of the four built on the assumption that you might want to be found again rather than skipped.

Card only.

Where the money goes on this page

Not to me. ChatRandom runs its affiliate programme in house, I have never applied to it, and four years of this page existing has produced exactly nothing in commission. So the recommendation above is the whole of what I have to offer here and there is no button under it. Further down, the alternatives block does pay me, on links to other platforms, and it says which ones.

Plan prices I read in 2022

The plan prices, which are my own from 2022 and have not been re-read at the checkout. And the free tier, which I have used at length without being charged for it, and which nobody has confirmed is unmetered by any standard this site would record.

Start on the free tier and see if the filters are worth twenty dollars

General random video chat first, and the option to choose where the matches come from later. Use the free tier before you decide: it is fully usable, and it will tell you whether twenty dollars a month is worth it to you.

If it is, Chatspin does a comparable job for $14.99 a month and $59.99 for six. The family has a cheaper door, and no page inside the family will tell you that.

Do not come here for a cam site. ChatRandom is the least adult of the four siblings and not adults-only at all, which puts it further from one than any of them. Twenty dollars buys a filter, not a performer. For an actual roster the ranked answer is Jerkmate, whose wallet is pegged to the dollar so a room’s price is readable in money.

I have not verified pricing for Chatrandom yet. My data page lists exactly which fields are missing and when each platform was last checked, and the calculator covers the platforms where the numbers are confirmed.