I rebuilt my failed chat app from scratch, here's what changed (GrowsChat)

Hey dev.to! I'm Behan, a solo full-stack developer. I built a random chat platform before this one. It failed, mostly because of media hosting costs and no real rate limiting, the classic "it looked good but wasn't built to last" problem. So with GrowsChat , I made a few decisions early and stuck to them: AI is always disclosed. If you're ever talking to our AI while we find you a real match, you'll know. No exceptions. No account needed to start a real conversation. Every video call has a safety check built in , and one tap ends anything that's gone wrong. We never accept user-uploaded media. Not photos, not videos, nothing from your device. Instead I built a situational image and sticker library, so conversations still feel expressive without opening the door to abuse or unsafe content. There's also an Atmosphere feature, small themed moods for a conversation, meant to add some life without needing any media upload at all. Tech stack Solo build on Next.js, MUI, Socket.IO, and deployed on Cloudflare Workers. Where things stand I'm launching on Product Hunt on September 16th : 👉 https://www.producthunt.com/products/pairly It's still early days for GrowsChat, so if this sounds interesting, a follow or an upvote when launch day comes would genuinely mean a lot. This is a solo build, and early support like that makes a real difference at this stage. Would also love feedback from other devs here, especially around the "no user media" approach and whether that trade-off makes sense to you. Happy to answer anything in the comments.