Monkey

Monkey is built around swiping rather than roulette. You look through Cards — profiles with a chosen mood and a song that plays when someone opens them — and add the people you like, rather than being handed whoever is next. Its listing says it was created by five teenagers in Los Angeles and that it has over 30 million users worldwide, a figure that is the company's own and that we have not verified.

You swipe through Cards to add friends, then talk by video, by text, or in Squad Chat, which is group video with the people you have added. The profile is the entry point rather than the conversation: a mood and a song are chosen in advance and shown to anyone browsing. That makes Monkey closer in shape to a social app that happens to have video than to a video chat service, and it means the first thing anyone knows about you is what you chose to display.

The listing does not describe pricing at all — no mention of a free tier, a subscription or in-app purchases — and its website does not publish a price list either. In a category where the paid tier usually buys control over who you meet, not knowing where that line falls is worth flagging rather than assuming. The absence is a gap in the source, not evidence that the app is free.

Monkey's listing says nothing about moderation, but its own safety centre does, and the claims are specific: a 100% human community where no bots are allowed, an environment moderated with AI tools, verification for stranger interactions, and AI moderation monitoring live video in real time. Read that against the shape of the product. On a roulette site, a bot in the pool wastes your time; on an app built on profiles you chose to add, a fake account is a fake friend, which is a different problem and a more expensive one. The claims are the company's own and nothing here verifies them, but they are the kind of claim that can be checked by using it.

People who would rather choose than be paired, and who are comfortable presenting a profile before a conversation. If the appeal of random video chat is that nobody knows anything about you, Monkey is working against that on purpose.

A social product wearing video chat's clothes, and coherent about it. The Cards model solves the problem roulette never does — giving two strangers something to start from — and the anti-bot claim is the right claim for a profile-based app to be making. The pricing silence and the unverified moderation claims are what to resolve before relying on it.