WattRoom

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.}

Why

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.

What's inside

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 .zwo and .erg import fill the shelf, and a free ramp test finds your FTP.
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 − and + keys or a Zwift Cog. Open WattRoom on your phone while the desk rides and the phone becomes your remote.
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.

The game modes

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.

How it compares

	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.

Run it

• 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 -d

Releases 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.

Develop

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. make screenshots redraws the share cards and screenshots from the running dev pair. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md; the decisions that hold are in WATTROOM.md.

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"])

Loading

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.

License

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.