Where it works
Everywhere. There is no city gate.
Sign up from anywhere and you are in. No waitlist, no counter, no city that has to earn its way to being allowed to use the product.
What changed
Bearing was going to open a city only once 3,000 people there had signed up, with a public counter per city and a waitlist behind it. That is gone. It was wrong for three reasons and the third is the one that settled it.
It excluded small towns permanently. Red Deer is never independently going to reach three thousand, so the gate was not a delay for those members, it was a refusal.
The queue position was not real. A gate at 3,000 is a threshold, not a sequence: number 40 and number 2,900 get in at the same instant. “Move up the list” rewarded nothing, and we were going to print it next to a progress bar.
And it contradicted the product. This app is built to be honest about a thin pool. The feed ends and says so — that’s everyone, nine people — and the dealbreakers screen prices every line you draw in people rather than in percentages. Refusing somebody because their town is small withholds the one product on the market that handles a small pool honestly.
What a small town gets instead
Radius. Your search reaches as far as you set it, from 5 km to 500. Red Deer at 150 km reaches both Calgary and Edmonton. The filter does not care about a metro boundary, and neither does a two-hour drive for somebody worth it.
The count, before you commit to anything. Every dealbreaker and every radius rung is priced in people on your own screen, live, against the real pool. If the honest answer where you live is four people, the product tells you it is four people — before you pay, not after.
The published median. We publish median feed size, including where it is bad. A city that is thin is told it is thin, in that city, in plain words. That is the same information the gate was supposed to protect people from, handed over instead.