Every app below decides something about your want before you can say it: a table of six, one introduction a week, a photo. Here is what changes when nothing is decided first.
Say the thing you want →Free. There is no profile to write. The first thing it asks is your birth year.
Think about the last thing you actually wanted from another person. Someone to run with on Sunday mornings who will not mind that you are slow. A person who has raised a Series A and will spend an hour on your deck. Someone to sit with on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays are bad. A dentist who takes your insurance and does not talk during the appointment.
Now open any app on this page and try to enter that. You will be asked which kind of want it was, and the categories are the app's rather than yours. The slow Sunday runner is a friend app or a fitness group depending on where you file it. The deck reader is a professional network, or a favour you are slightly embarrassed to ask for. Tuesday is a companion app, which is to say a decision that you are not going to meet anybody. You end up keeping four descriptions of yourself alive in four voices, and not one of them says the thing you would have said out loud.
Notapub asks nothing first. You say the sentence, in your own words, and the sorting happens after you have spoken instead of before. Everything below falls out of that one change.
222 and Timeleft decide you want a table of six, on a night they pick, in a city where they have launched. Ditto decides you want one person a week, on Wednesday, and that you are a student at a school it can verify. Known and Overtone decide you want one introduction at a time with a paragraph attached. Keeper and Tawkify decide you are looking for a spouse and then price the introduction, Keeper in the thousands per introduction with a success fee an order of magnitude larger. Tinder and Hinge decide you will be looked at in photographs first. Bumble moved friendship into a second download and decided it is a friendship and not anything else. Meetup decides you want a standing group with a schedule. Craigslist, Nextdoor and Facebook Groups decide you will post into a room and wait to be noticed. Character.AI and Replika decide you are not going to meet anybody.
Several of those are good decisions, and a few of these products execute them better than we execute anything. The trouble is when it gets made: before you have said a word, about a person the product has not met.
The companion apps got one thing right that most of this list is still catching up to. Talking is easier than writing a profile. Nobody performs on a voice call the way they perform in six photographs and three prompts, and someone who has been asked a good question will say more in fifteen minutes than they will type in a year.
That is the way in here. There is a voice, called Nora. She is not a person and says so at the start. You talk to her for about fifteen minutes about what you want and what you can offer, and that conversation becomes your page. You never write a profile.
What differs is the end of the call. For Replika the conversation is the product and the subscription renews, which is why February 2023 landed the way it did on so many people: a company changed a setting and a relationship changed with it. Nora hands you to real humans and stops. Known and Overtone had the same instinct about voice and then put a gatekeeper behind it, releasing one person at a time with a note. Notapub does not ration. What you said is reachable by anyone it fits, and you can talk to any profile you find, out loud, before deciding whether to write to them.
We also pay $50 for that first call. One per person, reviewed by hand. Every other product on this page takes the money in the other direction.
Keeper and Tawkify sell the same thing underneath. Somebody reads your intake, holds a picture of you in their head, and decides who you meet. Keeper's questionnaire runs well past a hundred questions and puts the cost on men. Tawkify puts a real matchmaker on it, which is better, and charges accordingly; its free members sit in a pool and may never be picked.
Screening is real work and it is worth paying for. What it costs you is everything the intake did not think to ask. A form with a hundred and twenty boxes still has no box for the fact that you are raising a kid alone, or that you are moving back to Lagos in three years, or that you have read Middlemarch twice and would like to argue about Lydgate.
Your sentence has all of that in it, because you wrote it rather than answered it. Notapub screens on what you said, it costs nothing, and there is no cap on how many people you are put in front of. The honest gap is the human: a matchmaker will ring you after a bad first meeting and change tack, and nobody here will ring you. What you get instead is that you can rewrite your own sentence in ten seconds, and who arrives changes with it.
Timeleft runs in more than 200 cities, says it has over three million members, and pitches itself as no bios, no planning. You buy a seat and six strangers have dinner. 222 does a longer survey and the same shape. Ditto does one person, Wednesday, on campus. All three are event products, so each one needs a night, a city launch, a fee and space in your week.
Groups here are made the same way everything else is, out of what people said they wanted. When three or four people's wants fit together that becomes a card, and you can call and ask about the group before meeting any of them. Nothing to buy, nothing to be free for on Wednesday.
What Timeleft has that we do not is a booked restaurant. If what you want is a table on a specific evening with the logistics handled, buy the seat. It is a good product. Notapub will hand you four people and the reason they fit; the eight o'clock reservation is yours to make.
Not everything you want from other people is social. A spare desk two days a week. A tutor for a fourteen year old who has stopped trying. Someone with a van on Saturday. Craigslist, Nextdoor and Facebook Groups carry that traffic and carry it well, Nextdoor especially, because a network organised by where you sleep knows things no interest graph can.
They all work one way, though. You post, it slides down a feed, and you either get lucky in the first hour or you post again next week. Your want has a shelf life measured in scroll depth.
Here a want does not expire and does not get scrolled past. It stays on your page and keeps working, and the people who have the thing arrive at it. The same box holds the desk and the Sunday runner, so there is one version of you rather than four. That is the part that adds up: everything you have ever said you wanted is still out there working while you are asleep.
More people. Tinder has hundreds of millions of them. Meetup has twenty years of standing groups that meet whether or not anybody new shows up. Nextdoor has your actual street. If you want somebody tonight in a city we are thin in, they will beat us tonight, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
That is a head start rather than a design, and it is why we pay for the first call instead of charging for it. What makes this work is people having said out loud what they want, so that is the thing worth buying.
The rest of this page is not a head start. The container chosen before you speak, the photograph first, the fee per introduction, the night in the diary, the gatekeeper releasing one person a week: those are decisions, and they hold at any size.
If you want a table booked on a set evening, Timeleft or 222. If you want a standing weekly group, Meetup. If something has happened on your street, Nextdoor. If you want a person to take your case personally and keep working it, pay a matchmaker. Use this alongside any of them; there is nothing to cancel.
No. Romance is one of the things people ask for here, and it is not the frame. The same box is used for a chess partner, a co-founder, a spare desk, a tutor and someone to talk to on a Tuesday.
No. You talk for about fifteen minutes, or you type a sentence if you would rather. There are no photos to upload and no prompts to answer.
Nothing, and there is no paid tier holding anything back. We pay $50 to people who finish that first call, one per person, and a person reviews each payout by hand.
It becomes your page, in the third person, and it is what people reach you through. You can read it, edit any line of it, or delete the account and the whole of it goes.
Each page below is the long version: what the product does, what it charges, and where it beats us.