Money
Every price we will ever charge
The whole ladder, including the increases, published before you pay anything. Nobody in this category publishes their future prices. It costs nothing to do and it is the reason to believe the rest of this.
The ladder
The price rises with the size of the pool
Because the pool is what you are buying. A filter with nobody behind it has nothing to filter, and the first members are paying for a room that is still mostly empty.
- $1
Founding
First 10,000 membersFounder’s rateYou're paying for a pool that barely exists yet. That's the honest price for it.
$10 a year — 10 months charged instead of twelve.
- $5
Early
10,000 – 75,000There are enough people here now that the filter actually has something to filter.
$50 a year — 10 months charged instead of twelve.
- $10
Standard
75,000 – 400,000Roughly half of what Hinge charges.
$100 a year — 10 months charged instead of twelve.
- $20
Mature
400,000+Half of what the incumbents charge for a premium tier. That is where we stop.
$200 a year — 10 months charged instead of twelve.
The ceiling
$20 is the top. Forever. A published ceiling is the other half of a published ladder; without it the ladder is only a warning about future increases. It is written into the database as a constraint rather than only into this page, so a charge above it is refused by the software that would have to make it.
It is also the reason there is no version of Bearing in an app store, permanently. You cannot promise a ceiling on a rail where somebody else sets the toll and can change it. That argument is written out here.
Who keeps a price
Two grandfathered tiers, and then it stops
The ladder governs what you pay today. The window governs who keeps it. They are two different rules and reading them as one is the mistake this section exists to prevent.
10,000 people, fixed by the member number assigned when the account goes live. That number never moves, so it is a promise rather than a marketing line.
10,000 people, fixed by the member number assigned when the account goes live. That number never moves, so it is a promise rather than a marketing line.
And after that, nothing
Past member 20,000 there is no lock at all. Those members pay whatever rung the ladder is on, and when it rises, their price rises with it. There is no third tier and there will not be one.
The bound is the entire point. Grandfathering here is a way of buying a user base quickly, not a loyalty scheme, so it is capped at 20,000 people rather than at a rung. Note that those are different edges: the early rung runs to 75,000 members, while the $5 lock stops at 20,000. Somebody who joins at number 40,000 pays $5 today because the product is on that rung today — and pays $10 when it turns over.
What the promise costs us is arithmetic anybody can check: 10,000 x $19 plus 10,000 x $15 — $340,000 a month of revenue we will never collect once the ladder reaches the ceiling, and not a cent more, ever.
Free
There is no trial, because the free tier is the trial
It does not expire. There is no seven-day cliff, no card wall in front of it, and no day on which the product gets worse because a clock ran out.
The top 3 of a list ranked for you, and you are told how many are in the whole list. Silently truncating it in a product whose position is telling you the true size of your pool would be the most corrosive thing we could build.
Replies are never limited. Half of a conversation the other person started is not ours to ration.
Fixed. Paying lets you set it yourself, anywhere from 5 km to 500 — which is what a small town is actually buying, since 150 km out of Red Deer reaches both Calgary and Edmonton.
How a day is counted, since we are being precise
Both daily allowances reset at midnight UTC. That is a convention rather than a fact about you — we do not store your timezone and every screen here works with JavaScript switched off, so “your calendar day” is not something this product can honestly claim to know. A fixed line you can state back to us is better than a rolling window that refills one place at a time at hours nobody chose, because the rolling version can only be explained by printing you a schedule of when to come back — and a product that prints one has built one.
Never paid for, at any tier, ever
Not free as an introductory offer and not free on one tier. There is no entitlement check anywhere near any of them, and if a future change needs one, the change is wrong. Paywalling the mission turns us into the thing we are replacing. The safety centre is here, and it does not ask whether you are signed in.
The fee math
What the card fee takes, at a dollar
This is the number that actually shapes this business, so here it is rather than a rounded claim about it. The card fee is charged per transaction, which means it is brutal on small ones.
The standard published rate is 2.9% plus $0.30 per successful charge. At the $1 rung that fixed $0.30 is most of the fee, which is why the same percentage costs us 33.0% of a dollar and 4.4% of twenty.
| Rung | You pay | Fee | We keep | Fee as |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founding | $1 | $0.33 | $0.67 | 33.0% |
| Early | $5 | $0.45 | $4.55 | 9.0% |
| Standard | $10 | $0.59 | $9.41 | 5.9% |
| Mature | $20 | $0.88 | $19.12 | 4.4% |
Which is why the annual price is what it is
A year costs 10 months. Two months free, and we push it honestly rather than as generosity, because it is arithmetic that works in both directions. At the $1 rung, twelve monthly charges leave us $8.04 across the year. One annual charge of $10 leaves us $9.41. We charge you less and keep more, and eleven occasions for a card to decline stop existing.
Processors sometimes agree an alternative rate with businesses whose average transaction is very small. Stripe does not publish one: availability varies by market and it is arranged with their sales team, not switched on. We have not asked and have not been granted anything, so every figure in the table above is the standard rate, which is the rate we actually expect to pay.
What that means about the first rung
The $1 rung is not revenue and we do not model it as revenue. Its job is to make joining a decision nobody has to think about, and to buy the density the filter needs before it can do anything useful. It roughly breaks even and we are fine with that — which is also why there is no trial to convert you at the end of. Nobody is going to manufacture a moment where we ask you for the dollar.
Referrals
A free month each way, and nothing expires
Every member has one permanent code and one permanent link. Somebody who arrives on it gets their first month free, with no code to type at checkout. When they have subscribed and stayed thirty days, you get a free month, and you can bank up to twelve at a time.
A free month is a month nobody is charged for. It is not a price of zero, and it never touches your locked rate — the credit ledger and the thing that fixes your price are separate machinery on purpose, because nothing may ever be able to move a rate somebody was promised.
Nothing here expires: not the code, not the link, not the banked months. If you leave because you met somebody here, your link keeps working and keeps paying.