Clubhouse

Clubhouse defines itself in one line — a social network based on voice — and the vocabulary it has settled on is worth learning before reading anything else: conversations are chats, live rooms and voice messages, rooms are found in a hallway, and the invite-driven groups inside it are Houses. The product is still being built, with releases arriving near-weekly and features added through 2026, which is worth knowing because the story most people remember about Clubhouse is that it faded. The only figure it publishes about its own size is a ceiling rather than a boast: a statement filed under European law says its monthly active users in the EU were below five million, and the company has never put a user number of its own on its website. Signing up requires a phone number, and a number issued by a VoIP service will not do.

You open the app and drop into a room, either from the hallway that the app has assembled for you or from one of the invite-only Houses you belong to. Listening is the default and speaking is a request: you raise your hand, and whether you can depends on the host's setting, which can allow everyone or only friends of the speakers. Hosts get the tools the format needs — a hand-raise queue, a mute-all-speakers control, the ability to switch chat off, and the ability to delete a single message. Replays are recordings of open rooms, and only the creator can enable them; the help centre is of two minds about whether that happens by default, with one article saying replays are enabled by default and another that they must be switched on during room creation. Short clips are a newer and much narrower feature: 5 seconds at the shortest, 55 at the longest, and for now they are limited to iPhones, to English and to rooms in the United States. Voice messages work asynchronously, so a conversation does not have to happen at the same time, and a new group member cannot read the history that came before them.

The terms promise that the basic service is free, and the subscription is what you would expect of a social app in this decade: Clubhouse Plus adds anonymous listening, the ability to see who viewed your profile and to browse the photo a user used before their current one, more profile links and activity sharing. The finding that matters is where the price is not: it appears nowhere on any Clubhouse page, and the only figures are in an app store listing, where the monthly subscription is 5.99 dollars. Coins are the second paid product, spent on reactions, and the terms are blunt about what they are worth — not redeemable, no cash value, not transferable, and a final sale, with refunds only through the store that sold them. Money for creators is not a share of anything. The terms describe it as a discretionary payment from Clubhouse to the creator rather than a transfer from another user, which means the company can change or cancel the programme at will, and the documents disagree about how often it pays: a help article says monthly, the rewards terms say quarterly or more often at the company's discretion. Earning at all requires being at least 18, holding a reputation score of at least 100, and completing identity and bank onboarding with a payment provider, with balances that expire after long inactivity.

The minimum age is 13, or older where local law sets a higher age of consent, and the company says it checks the age of anyone under 18 using live image authentication through an outside vendor, which it says it does not keep afterwards. Teenagers get a different product by default: a private profile, voice messages limited to mutual friends, and mature content kept out of the hallway. The most consequential fact about this platform is stated in its own privacy policy without any softening: Clubhouse records all live rooms so that it can investigate complaints, keeps those recordings for 90 days for initial investigations and longer where its legal basis allows, and transcribes open rooms for personalisation. Replays are stored and may be shown to people outside Clubhouse, and chats are kept indefinitely unless the user deletes them. Moderation is largely subcontracted to machines: the company's own list of data processors names automated content-moderation services, audio and conversation analysis, transcription, and a child-safety reporting line. Reporting happens in the app rather than by email, an appeal may be made once per decision, and a final warning precedes a permanent suspension — but the outcome of a report is something the company says it cannot reveal. Blocking is weaker than the word suggests: a blocked user can still see your profile, and inside a House their content is not hidden from you.

Friends and friends of friends rather than an audience, which is the company's own framing: it says the product is not about posting content but about having real conversations with your friends and meeting theirs. The absence of a camera is the point for people who want to be social without being seen, and rooms can be closed to friends, to friends of friends, or opened to everyone. It is a phone-first product with no desktop equivalent to speak of and an app that requires a recent version of the operating system, so anyone who works from a computer is not the audience. Creators are welcome but not on the terms they may expect, since the money is discretionary and gated behind age, reputation and identity checks.

The most recorded platform in this batch by its own account and the least forthcoming about what it charges. Room audio is captured, kept and transcribed, third-party services analyse the content, and the company says so in a policy rather than in a slogan, which is more candour than most — but a reader looking for the price of the subscription will not find it anywhere on Clubhouse's own pages, only in a store listing. The reporting loop is open at the front and closed at the back: reports must be filed in the app, one appeal is allowed, and what happened next is explicitly not disclosed. The company's documents disagree with each other on whether replays are on by default and on whether creator payouts arrive monthly or quarterly, which is a small thing that says something about how carefully the programme is documented. And the one number it does publish about itself is a legal ceiling, below five million monthly users in Europe, which is the plainest fact in a review that otherwise has to be assembled from processor lists and policy clauses.