Introducing Chatimator

Text-story videos are everywhere — TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts. The format is simple: a conversation plays out on a phone screen, message by message, and you can't look away until you know how it ends.

Making one has never been simple, though. The usual workflow is a screenshot generator, an editing app, manual keyframes for every bubble, and a sound pack for the message tones. Or a paid tool that renders on a server, takes minutes per export, and stamps a watermark on the result unless you subscribe.

Chatimator replaces all of that with one editor.

Every clip in this post is a real Chatimator export — unmute for the message tones.

Write it like a text — or let AI

You type the conversation the way you'd send it. Enter adds a bubble, senders alternate automatically, and the live preview plays your chat with typing indicators, spring animations and auto-scroll. A complete skit takes about a minute to write.

Or skip the writing entirely: describe the premise in a sentence and AI writes the whole conversation — cast, pacing, reactions and a punchline. Then edit any line you like.

Export is free — and stays free

Press export and you get a 1080p, 60fps MP4 with message sounds baked into the audio track. No watermark, no account, no queue. Animated video export is the feature other tools paywall; it's our free tier.

Nothing leaves your device

Chatimator renders video with WebCodecs, directly in your browser. Your conversations are never uploaded — there is no server that sees your script, and projects save to your browser's local storage. That's also why exports finish in seconds: there's no upload, no render farm, no download. Your machine does the work.

Three platforms, pixel-faithful

iMessage, WhatsApp and Instagram DM — each in light and dark mode, with correct status bars, bubble tails, ticks, receipts, voice notes and typing dots. Group chats, photo and video bubbles, emoji reactions and quoted replies are all in.

What's next

Chatimator is free while in beta. A Pro tier (4K export, teams, higher AI limits) is planned, but everything currently free stays free. If you make something with it, we'd love to see it — and if something's missing, tell us.

Open the editor and export your first video in under a minute.