About ChatViewer
ChatViewer is a small, independent tool that opens exported chats from WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Signal, shows them the way the app did, and turns them into a PDF. It is built and run by one person, and everything it does to your chat happens inside your own browser.
Who makes it
My name is Ashutosh. I am a software developer in India and the sole proprietor behind ChatViewer. There is no company, no team and no investors: I write the parser, the PDF engine and every guide on this site myself, and I answer the support email.
The project started in July 2026 as a way to read a WhatsApp _chat.txt file without squinting at a wall of timestamps in Notepad. It grew into a PDF exporter when people kept asking the same question in forums and legal-help threads: how do I turn this export into something I can print, share or hand to a lawyer without uploading my private messages to a stranger's server?
How it works
The page you open is the whole product. When you drop an export into it, JavaScript running in your browser reads the file, works out which app produced it, which region's date format it uses and where the media files are, and renders the conversation. Nothing is sent anywhere. You can load the page, disconnect from the internet, and it still works; the privacy policy describes this in detail.
The PDF is generated on your device too. The court-ready tier adds a cover page, sequential message numbers, Bates stamps and the SHA-256 hash of both your original export and the finished PDF, then writes a verification page that tells anyone how to recompute those hashes. The certificate templates for India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada are convenience forms that prefill the facts the tool knows; they are not legal advice, and they still have to be reviewed and signed by the person who made the export.
How it is tested
The parser is checked against real export samples from every supported app, including exports written in different languages and date orders, and the test suite runs on every change before the site is published. If an export does not open correctly, that is a bug I want to know about: send me the first few lines of the file with the names changed and I will fix the parser.
How the site is funded
Viewing is free and always will be. The two paid tiers, Unlimited PDF and Court-ready PDF, are one-time purchases handled by Razorpay; there is no subscription and no advertising network on the tool pages. That revenue pays for the domain, hosting and the time spent keeping the parsers in step with each app's export format.
Contact
Email [email protected]. I read every message, though replies can take a day or two. For refunds and terms, see Terms & refunds.
ChatViewer is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to WhatsApp, Meta, Telegram, Apple or Signal. Those names belong to their owners and are used here only to describe which export formats the tool reads.