How it works
Hey, money ruins everything when it comes to online dating apps.
If Love Letter was about the money, we’d be just as evil as the rest of the industry, because we would make more money the longer you tried. The longer you searched. And when we saw that you were tired and sad and leaving, we’d change our prices to make even dipping your toe back into the pool cost $30 for a week. (Sound familiar?)
And we’d sell you “boosts” and “spotlights” and all that nonsense, because we’d be a company with investors and they want us to be more profitable, not better.
No thanks. Not here.
Our heroes were the early pioneers of the old school internet who just wanted to make things better.
Open to everyone. Curated for the people who still believe in this.
When we were building this, we thought about being “exclusive”, not in terms of being rich or being an A-lister, but in terms of being cool. Exclusively for people who treat each other great and who bring an open heart and honesty to a date and are the kind of people who make other people feel good.
That’s pretty easy to do with an invite mechanism and other users having to vouch for you, but in the end we went the other way. Let’s let in the world and build the site so it rewards what we all want to see.
Be cool to each other? The algo bumps you toward the top of visibility and adds to why you’d match with other people. Go on dates? Even better. Every time we “lose” a member because they met someone they really like and are taking the time to explore that? We do the happy dance.
But there’s a flip side, too. Ghost people? Call them names or insult them? The moderation will block most of it anyway but you’ll also find you’re increasingly invisible. Whatever stack there is, the algo will drop you to the bottom of it, and that’s your new home, unless you decide to join the rest of us in our real effort to create a dating community that’s fun.
Dating is about vulnerability.
When we go on dates, we’re asking people to like us. Heck, we’re asking people to love us sometimes. That makes the whole thing scary and we know that and we want to help. Really.
We’ll make every design decision to make our members safe and respected and having fun, how they define it. Because that’s the key. One person’s perfect first date is another person’s yawn fest and people being different is what makes dating exciting to begin with.
So we’re asking respectfully. Be yourself and share what you want and who you are and over time we’ll work to earn your trust that we’ll use that to try and make you happier.
Oh, and we don’t sell any of your info to anyone. Not our style.
Your Innermost is yours, until you hand someone the key.
As we were building this, we recognized that sometimes it’s a bit too much to ask for too much vulnerability. We have people we care about who lead unconventional lives and they were like, hey, that’s really cool, please don’t exclude us and give US a way to participate and find our people too.
So we created Innermost. It’s basically a room in your own profile where you can put anything and the room is invisible to every other member unless you specifically invite them in.
The algo can read it so we still get great matches, but your secrets are safe and yours but maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that someone who loves you because you’re crazy about something a little off the beaten path, not grudgingly accepting of it.
Let your flag fly in Innermost.
Free for you. A few restaurants pay the freight.
So, how do we make all this work and not charge members any money? Two reasons: first, making something like Love Letter is expensive in time and love, but cheap in money dollars.
Each member costs us around ten cents a month, all in. The tools to build the site cost less than a thousand bucks, all in. So, to us, this is free and since we never wanted to make any money off it, it made sense to give it to the world for free.
For the few expenses we do have? We just cover them. We recommend a handful of restaurants we genuinely love as great places to meet up, but to be clear, they don’t pay us, not yet, and maybe not ever. The plan, when we actually need money, is that a few good restaurants pay the freight, and we’ll figure out which partners make the most sense. We’d rather grow to a million happy daters than do an IPO. For absolutely sure.
REI is a hero. Wikipedia. Like I said elsewhere, we aim to bring back how we felt in the earliest days of the internet, when everything was possible and everything was free. That’s our passion.