Press
The press kit
The fact sheet, the answers to the questions that get asked every time, the founder, and the assets. All of it published rather than emailed, so that the answer is the same in every interview and you can check it against the last one.
Contact
Press enquiries: [ press contact route not yet established ]
That gap is real and it is ours. There is no company address and no established contact route yet, and a press page that invented one would be the first thing on this site that was not true. Everything below is answerable without writing to anybody.
In one paragraph
The description we would write for you
Take it verbatim if it is useful. Nothing in it is a claim you cannot check on another page of this site.
Bearing is a dating app that filters on values and hard dealbreakers before the first message rather than after the tenth date. Members answer topics from a published bank and rank each one flexible, strong or dealbreaker. Each member gets 5 dealbreakers, and they filter mutually: if either side fails, the pair never exists. The resulting list is finite, usually short, and the product prices every line in people before it is drawn — it tells you how many members a dealbreaker removes before you spend it. The bank is written by members through a public ballot rather than by the company, the full price ladder is published in advance with a permanent ceiling of $20 a month, and the share of departing members who left because they met somebody is published every month.
Fact sheet
The checkable things
Every figure here is read out of the same code the product runs on, not typed into this page. If one of them moves, this page moves with it.
What it is
A dating app that filters on core values and hard dealbreakers before first contact.
The mechanic
5 dealbreakers per member, enforced by the database rather than by a screen. They filter both ways, so a pair either clears both sets of lines or does not exist.
The topic bank
228 topics across 9 dimensions, 10 of them answered by everybody at signup. Published in full, without an account — every topic, every option, and where each one stands.
Who writes the bank
Members. They propose a topic, have it seconded and take it to a vote. An editor controls wording and cannot decline a subject, a published charter bounds what a vote can do, and every proposal that ever existed stays published, including the ones that failed.
Never filterable
Race, ethnicity, national origin, disability and health status as distinct from health choices. They are not in the bank and there is no version of the product in which they are.
Price
A published ladder of 4 rungs, from $1 a month for the first members to a permanent ceiling of $20. All of it is on one page, in advance, including the increases.
The free tier
3 people from your ranked list a day, 1 new conversation a day, within 40 km. No card, no expiry, no trial that ends.
Distribution
The web, permanently. There is no app store version and there is not going to be one, because a price ceiling is not a promise you can make on a rail where somebody else sets the toll. The argument is published.
Where it operates
North America, one metro at a time. The EU and the UK are deliberately not served yet — every answer in this product is GDPR Article 9 special-category data and that compliance work is not funded.
What is published monthly
The exit rate: of everybody who deleted their account, the share who said they were leaving because they met somebody. Published whether or not it flatters us.
The company
One founder, no outside money that requires engagement growth, and no plans to take any. See below.
The standing replies
The answers do not change under pressure
These are the questions that arrive in every interview, and these are the answers. Published so that nobody has to wonder whether a warmer version exists for a friendlier outlet, and so that a change to one of them is visible as a change.
“Will you remove a topic because people complain about it?”
No. Members put it there, members can vote it out, and the vote is public. We do not get a veto and neither does anybody else. If you think a topic should not be in the bank, the argument is with the people who voted for it, and the record of that vote is published.
We can refuse an angry letter. We cannot refuse a court order. If the bank ever changes because of one, we will say plainly which of the two happened.
“So anybody can filter on anything?”
Within the law, yes, and that is deliberate. The alternative is a company deciding which of your reasons for compatibility are legitimate, which is exactly the arrogance we are replacing. What nobody can filter on is a protected characteristic — race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, health status. Those are not chosen. Values are.
We do not have a position on what should matter to you. We have a position on telling you what it costs.
“Does this not sort people politically?”
People are not looking for a partner. They are looking for theirs, and every dating product that has ever existed is extreme filtering — we are the only one that shows you what your filters cost, in people, before you commit to them.
A high filter rate is a fact about the person using the product, not about the product. And politics is one dimension of the bank among several, competing with children, medicine, money, monogamy and how somebody decides what is true. We will publish where dealbreakers actually go once the figures are real — see the section below for why they are not yet.
We will not claim to connect people across difference. It is the kind of line that does not survive the follow-up question, and getting caught overselling it would cost more than the claim is worth.
“Is this not just OkCupid?”
OkCupid has asked importance-weighted compatibility questions since 2004, it is owned by the largest dating company in the world, and a values-and-dealbreakers app called Weaver shipped in 2023. We are not going to pretend this was an unoccupied idea, and the argument is stronger for conceding it: the constraint was never on asking the questions.
OkCupid will tell you that you are a 43% match with somebody and then show you that person anyway. The number is decoration on a stack that never shrinks, because the stack is the product. A company whose revenue is attention cannot let a compatibility model delete most of its own inventory. We remove them, and that is the whole difference.
“You are one person. What happens at ten thousand reports?”
Most reports resolve as a block, and the obvious spam and scam patterns action themselves. What this company is not running is a department that adjudicates opinions — that cost exists at other apps because they decided to be the referee, and it is the thing being given up here rather than the thing being economised on.
Child safety and payment-processor rules are the exceptions, and they are not optional at any size. The safety centre says what is in place and, where something is not built yet, says that instead.
What we will not give you yet
The numbers that are not ready, and why we are telling you rather than rounding them
You will want a distribution: where members actually spend their dealbreakers, how much of a metro a typical person sees, how often a match pairs somebody on the left with somebody on the right. We have figures for all three and they are simulated, against a ten-topic bank. Two of those ten topics are about abortion, which is most of the reason abortion leads the table — the shape is an artifact of what the simulator was asked, not a fact about members. At the real size of the bank it will be completely different.
So they are not on this page. Production figures or nothing, and a number printed here would be quoted for years after we corrected it.
When they are real they go on the published-numbers page, monthly, including the unflattering ones. One correction worth making in advance, because it is the easiest sentence in this subject to get wrong: feed share is not the match rate. How much of a metro somebody sees and how often a match crosses party lines are different numbers, and conflating them produces a headline neither of them supports.
The founder
Who is behind it
The founder is [ founder name and biography not yet published here ]
Bearing is built and operated by that one person, with no hires until revenue supports them. That is achievable for this product specifically, and only because of decisions already made: the company is not the arbiter of the question bank, so the complaint that consumes other companies is answered here with a link to a public ledger rather than with a judgement.
The founder does not state their own political positions, on the record or off it. This is a sorting product and it has to be equally useful to a devout homeschooling family and to a childfree atheist. The moment it reads as one side’s app, the other side leaves and the filter has nothing left to filter. That discipline is a permanent cost of running this company and it is not a media-training reflex — it is the product constraint that everything else depends on.
Interviews are given across the spectrum, deliberately, and booking is balanced on purpose. An appearance on one outlet is not an endorsement of it, and a refusal is not a comment on it either.
Photography: [ founder photograph not yet available ]
Assets
The mark, the wordmark and the rules that go with them
Use them as they are. The rules below exist because the mark stops meaning anything if they are broken, not because a brand guideline said so.
The mark
Two rays from a single origin with the angle between them. It is declination — the difference between where the compass points and where north actually is, which every chart in the world prints because a navigator who does not correct for it does not notice until the error has compounded past fixing. It draws the problem rather than the remedy, which is why it beat the four alternatives.
- mark.svg — the full mark with the angle arc, for 32px and above.
- icon-512.png and icon-192.png — the app icon, cropped tighter so the angle survives the rounded corner.
- apple-touch-icon.png
Never rotate it upright, because the angle is the mark. Never recolour both rays the same, because the whole point is the difference between them. Never close the angle into a filled triangle. Clear space is the height of the mark on every side.
Wordmark, type and colour
The wordmark is Bearing set in Bricolage Grotesque 700 at letter-spacing: -0.04em. The product sets headlines in Bricolage Grotesque, interface text in Plus Jakarta Sans, and anything a reader is meant to check in DM Mono.
The red is the apparent ray in the mark and, inside the product, it means one thing only: a dealbreaker. It is never an error state and never a destructive action. That is worth knowing if you are screenshotting the interface, because a red pill in a screenshot is a line somebody drew, not something going wrong.
Nothing on this page is embargoed and nothing on this site is held back for members. If you are writing about Bearing and something here is wrong, that is worth more to us than a flattering paragraph.