The argument
Why Bearing isn’t in the App Store
Because we promised you a price ceiling, and we can’t keep that promise on somebody else’s rail.
The position
We will not build a business on a rail where someone else sets the toll and can change it.
We publish every price we will ever charge. $1 a month now, $20 at the very top, and never more than that. That promise only means something if we control it — and inside an app store we don’t. Apple and Google set their cut, change it when they like, and are currently in court arguing about what it should be. Whatever they decide, the bill arrives at your door, because every app that pays it prices for it. That is why the other apps cost forty dollars a month.
Note what that is and is not. It is not a claim about a number. Numbers move, and this one is moving as you read. It is a claim about who holds the pricing power over a promise we made to you, and that does not change when a rate does.
First, the version of this argument we are not making
“Apple takes thirty per cent” is no longer true, and we are not going to say it
The easy version of this page would be wrong, and the first developer who read it would correct us. Here is where it actually stands.
Apple has permitted external payment links since May 2025 — no entitlement, no approval, and no commission — following the contempt ruling in Epic v. Apple. We could ship a native iOS app today and take payment on the web at nothing.
Apple has since proposed a 15% commission on those external-link purchases. The Ninth Circuit reversed the outright ban on any commission and sent it back to set a rate; the Supreme Court has cleared a path to review the rates themselves.
The EU operates a different regime again under the Digital Markets Act, on its own timetable, with its own numbers.
Since we publish those too
What a dollar costs to collect
Every figure here is the same one the pricing page does its arithmetic with. Apple's is theirs, not ours.
- Running the whole of Bearing for one member, a month7.5 cents
- The card processor, on $1 (2.9% + 30 cents)33 cents
- Apple’s small-business rate on $1 (15%)15 cents
- Apple’s standard rate on $1 (30%)30 cents
Apple’s small-business rate on a dollar is twice what it costs us to run the entire service for you. At their standard rate, four times.
The card fee is 33 cents on the same dollar, and we are not pretending that is nothing — at this rung the fixed thirty cents is most of it, which is the whole reason annual prepay exists. The difference is that a processor charges us for moving money and does not also decide what we may charge you, or whether you are allowed to exist.
And the part that is not about money
This product asks about politics, religion and health
Those answers are the product. On a store, a policy change or a single reviewer's judgement about them is an existential event for the company, and there is no appeal we could make that a member would benefit from.
A store listing is a permission to operate that is renewed on somebody else’s schedule. We would be asking that permission for a product whose entire function is letting people state, and filter on, exactly the views a content policy is most likely to get nervous about — and we would be asking it again on every release.
There is also the plain engineering answer: a native app is a permanent commitment, on two platforms, in two languages, forever. Every screen built twice and reviewed by strangers. Bearing is run by very few people and a $1 subscription; that commitment is not compatible with the price.
What this costs us
Printed, because a commitment without its costs reads as spin
No store discovery
The big one. A meaningful share of dating installs come from store search and browse, and we give that up entirely. It was never going to be our channel — the quiz, the ballot and earned media are — but that is a reason it hurts less, not a reason it does not hurt.
Installing takes instructions
Real and bad, on iPhone especially: Safari only, Share, then Add to Home Screen, in a menu most people have never opened. Ten seconds of instruction instead of one tap. The instructions are at the bottom of this page and we spent real design time on them.
“It’s not a real app”
A perception cost with some people, and the only honest answer to it is for the thing to be good. It installs, it sends notifications, it works with the signal off, and it has no ads because we do not need to make up a difference.
Saying “never” out loud
The word is what gives this its force, and it removes the option later. If native ever became genuinely necessary — a distribution partnership, a jurisdiction that demanded it, a court settling the rate at zero permanently — reversing a public “never” would cost real credibility, for a company whose whole proposition is that it says true things about its own economics.
We are making the trade anyway. A promise with an escape hatch is not a promise, and this one buys something the incumbents can never say. But the door closes behind us, and we would rather write that down here than discover it later.
Get the app
There is nothing to download.
Bearing runs in your browser and installs to your home screen in about ten seconds — its own icon, its own window, no address bar, notifications and all. There is no App Store version and there is not going to be.
Sent this link by somebody, or scanned a code? You are already there. This page is the app — the two buttons above open it, and the steps below keep it on your home screen so you do not have to find the link again.
Then put it on your home screen
On an iPhone or iPad
It has to be Safari. Add to Home Screen is a Safari feature on iOS, so Chrome, Firefox and Edge on an iPhone cannot do it — and neither can the browser inside Instagram, Messenger or TikTok. If you tapped a link in one of those, open the menu in the corner and choose Open in Safari first.
- Tap Share at the bottom of the screen.
- Scroll down the sheet and tap Add to Home Screen.
- Tap Add. Bearing is on your home screen with its own icon.
On an Android phone
Chrome, Edge, Samsung Internet and Firefox can all do this. Chrome usually offers it on its own; if it has not, the menu always works.
- Tap the menu at the top right of the browser.
- Tap Install app, or Add to Home screen if that is what your browser calls it.
- Confirm Install. It lands in your app drawer like anything else.
On a computer
Worth doing if you read on a laptop: it opens in its own window with no tabs and no address bar.
- Chrome or Edge: click the install icon at the right-hand end of the address bar, or the browser menu, then Install Bearing.
- Safari on a Mac: the File menu, then Add to Dock.
- Firefox does not install web apps. Bearing works normally in it; there is just no icon to add.