Discord for indoor cycling. Your crew rides your own roads in a 3D world, or one structured workout with every smart trainer on its own rider's FTP. Voice is built in, so you talk the whole way.
Ride now at wattroom.ch · Desktop app · Game modes · Self-host · Contribute
A crew session on an imported road, in the 3D world.
Indoor training is boring alone, and riding with friends usually means three apps: a training app, Discord for voice, and something for music, all fighting over one headset. Zwift answers boredom with a game world. WattRoom answers it with your crew:
- A crew that stays. A crew has chat channels for the week and voice channels for ride night, like a Discord server for your pain cave. Anyone in the voice channel starts a session: a free ride on a road, a workout, a race or a game.
- Different FTPs, one session. Workouts are written in percentages of FTP, and every trainer holds its own rider's share in ERG mode. The 180 W rider and the 320 W rider ride the same intervals side by side, and it hurts both of them the same.
- Talk the whole way. Voice is one tap, the camera is optional, and the crew's jukebox plays in sync for everyone and ducks when someone speaks.
- Free, in the browser, open source. Chrome or Edge talks to your trainer over Bluetooth. Nothing to install and nothing to pay.
|
Workouts on the road. Ride a workout on one of your roads and its next three blocks are painted on the asphalt, each with its name and your target. A sprint gets a banner across the road from 1 km out. 
|
Or on the graph. A workout without a road rides on its interval graph,
every block labelled. The library, an editor and 
|
|
Your ghost. Ride a road of yours again from its start and the rider you were last time rides beside you, a see-through figure in your own kit. The bike computer says the gap in words. 
|
Gears and your phone. Easier and Harder shift virtual gears on a road,
from the screen, the
|
|
Races on your roads. Pick a road in the session picker, tap Race it, and choose Race, Last Light or Wheelrace. Races run on W/kg, with results by category on the closing card. 
|
Seven game modes, decided by watts alone and measured on each rider's own FTP, so the smallest engine in the crew can win. 
|
Every ride saves privately, with a .fit file to download and one tap to
Strava. Voice and video are never recorded.
| Mode | How it plays |
|---|---|
| Sprint Roulette | Five sprints land at random, a klaxon three seconds before each. |
| Points Race | Two-minute intervals with sprints hidden in them. Every one scores. |
| Watt Golf | Hit a wattage for ten seconds, with the meter turned off. |
| Backyard Ramp | Three-minute rounds, +5 % FTP each. Ten seconds below and you're out. |
| Collective Ramp | The same, on the crew's average. Nobody gets dropped alone. |
| Floor is Lava | A power zone is called. Leave it and you burn a life. |
| Team Relay | One rider on the front at 110 %, everyone else recovering. |
Races on a road start from the session picker: Race, Last Light (10, 20 or 30 minutes) and Wheelrace (a par of 15 to 45 minutes). The parameters live in docs/spec/game-modes.md. You can try a sprint on the website.
Note
Hardware and browsers. WattRoom needs a smart trainer that speaks Bluetooth FTMS, which most current trainers do. Pre-FTMS Wahoo units are not supported yet. It also needs Chrome or Edge on Windows, macOS or Android, or the desktop app. On Linux, Chrome keeps Web Bluetooth behind a flag. Safari and Firefox cannot reach a trainer, so iPhone and iPad riders can join the crew and the call but not ride. That is a researched decision, not an oversight.
| WattRoom | Zwift | TrainerRoad | MyWhoosh | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | US$19.99/mo | US$21.99/mo per rider | Free |
| One workout, each on own FTP | ✓ anyone in the channel starts it | ✓ via a Meetup | ✓ up to 11 riders | pacer-led group workouts |
| Voice built in | ✓ | text chat | ✓ voice and video | text chat |
| 3D world | your own roads | ✓ | none | ✓ |
| Runs in a browser | ✓ | – | – | – |
| Open source | ✓ AGPL | – | – | – |
Checked September 2026. There are sources and a "pick them if…" for each on wattroom.ch/zwift-alternative. We make WattRoom, so check for yourself.
- Hosted, free: wattroom.ch. Start a crew and send the code.
- Desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux: wattroom.ch/download.
- Your own server: one Go binary with the web app embedded, Postgres and LiveKit, all in one Docker Compose stack on a small VM.
Self-host in five minutes
mkdir -p /opt/wattroom && cd /opt/wattroom
# copy this repository's deploy/ directory here
cp .env.example .env # every value is explained inside
cp livekit.yaml.example livekit.yaml # same keys as .env
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -dReleases are CalVer tags (ghcr.io/natrontech/wattroom:2026.09.1). An update
is a tag bump, and a rollback is the previous tag: migrations only ever add
(ADR-0019).
The full guide, including how LiveKit reaches the server and what to back up,
is in deploy/README.md.
Requirements: Go 1.26+, Node 22+, pnpm, Docker. The pnpm version is pinned in
web/package.json (packageManager), and pnpm 10+ or corepack installs it for you.
make infra # Postgres + LiveKit (dev mode) in containers
make dev-server # terminal 1: Go server with hot reload on :8080
make dev-web # terminal 2: Vite dev server on :5174 (proxies /api + /ws)No smart trainer needed: the simulated trainer covers development, and
/dev/channel is a full mock voice channel. make site-screens redraws the
screenshots in this README and on the landing from the design shots, and
make screenshots redraws the share cards and the other pages' screenshots
from the running dev pair. Start with
CONTRIBUTING.md; every product and architecture decision is
in WATTROOM.md and docs/decisions/.
flowchart LR
subgraph Browser["Browser (Chrome / Edge)"]
SPA["SvelteKit SPA<br/>+ prerendered public pages"]
end
Trainer(["Smart trainer<br/>BLE FTMS"]) <-- Web Bluetooth --> SPA
SPA <-- "REST + WebSocket" --> Server["Go server<br/>live hub in memory"]
SPA <-- WebRTC --> LiveKit["LiveKit SFU<br/>voice + camera"]
Server --> PG[("PostgreSQL<br/>durable data only")]
SPA -. "YouTube IFrame" .-> YT(["Jukebox"])
The seams are deliberate. The browser owns the trainer, the server owns live state in memory, and Postgres owns only what has to last (docs/ARCHITECTURE.md). WattRoom ships several times a day: a release only ever adds a small, merged change, and rolling back means repointing the image at the previous tag.
AGPL-3.0, © Natron, built in Switzerland. If WattRoom made a Tuesday night better, star the repo. It helps other pain-cave dwellers find it.