Your relationship is not a data set: why we sell nothing

There is a rule of thumb people repeat about free apps: if you are not paying, you are the product. It is a little glib, but the mechanics behind it are real, and they are worth spelling out, because they explain almost every annoying thing software does to you.

A company that gives away an app still has to cover salaries and servers. If nobody pays for the app, the money has to come from somewhere else, and the two usual somewhere elses are advertising and data. Both of them work better the more the company knows about you. That is the whole trick. The privacy policy is not the cause, it is the paperwork that follows from the funding.

We build Duoheart for two people at a time, and the material it holds is about as private as material gets. So we picked the arrangement that does not create a reason to look.

What we do not do

No advertising. There is no ad slot in the app, no sponsored daily topic, and no plan to add one. Ads would give us an incentive to know what mood you are in, which is precisely the thing we have built the app not to know.

No selling or sharing data with data brokers. Not aggregated, not anonymised, not "for research". The categories sound harmless and they are how most of it happens.

No tracking for profiling. We are not building a picture of you to be used somewhere else, and we do not have an advertising identity for you.

And, structurally, no ability to do most of this even if we wanted to. Your answers and messages are end to end encrypted. The shared key is generated on your devices, our servers store ciphertext, and there is no readable pile of relationship data on our side to monetise. That is worth more than a policy, because policies are edited by whoever runs a company next.

The safest data is the data a company never had. Everything else is a promise about the future.

The engagement machinery we left out

Selling attention does not only shape what an app collects, it shapes what it does. If a company earns per minute of your time, the product grows features designed to take minutes: streaks you feel bad about breaking, badges, endless feeds, notifications timed to catch you when you are most likely to open.

We do not earn anything from your time, so we could leave that out, and we did. Duoheart gives you five questions a day and a conversation with one person. When you have answered and read your partner's answers and said what you wanted to say, the useful part of the day is over. A good evening with Duoheart is a short one.

This is a genuinely easier product to design when nobody in the building is watching a minutes-per-user chart.

What it costs us to work this way

It costs us reach. Free apps grow faster, and "free" is the single most effective word in software marketing. Asking people to pay for something they have not tried yet, in a category full of free options, is a slower road.

It costs us some product ideas too. We cannot build clever features on top of everybody's data, because we do not have everybody's data. We cannot analyse what couples write to find patterns, because we cannot read what couples write. Some of those features would honestly be interesting. They are also exactly the features we would not want built on our own conversations, so they stay unbuilt.

And it costs us the safety net of a big investor who wants a big return. We are a small team in Estonia. Small is a constraint, but it is also the thing that makes the plan credible: we do not need a hundred million users for the numbers to work.

So how the money works

You pay us. That is the whole model.

The first fifty couples, the ones we call founding couples, use Duoheart free forever. After that there is a small monthly price. Not a free tier with the good parts locked away, not a trial that quietly renews at four times the price. One price, for the app.

The nice property of this arrangement is that our interests and yours point the same direction. We make money when the app is worth keeping. If it stops being worth keeping, you stop paying, and that is the correct outcome. An ad-funded version of us would still be earning from you on the months you felt worse.

The plainest way to check any of this

Read what we collect and hold us to it. Ask what happens to your data if you delete your account. Ask what we would hand over if somebody asked us for your conversation, and notice that the answer is limited by cryptography rather than by our good intentions.

We would rather be judged on that than on a slogan. The beta is on TestFlight for iPhone and Firebase App Tester for Android, in sixteen languages, and the install guide is at duoheart.app/get.