Peatchy
Why a selfie

The selfie is the door. Paying only raises the ceiling.

Peatchy is free to join, and we could have paid for that by selling your attention back to you in $7 boosts. Almost every dating app does. It works, and it is the reason the good ones become unusable within two years.

We also thought, for a while, that charging everyone was the answer to scammers. It is not, and it is worth saying plainly because we believed it. A romance scammer makes thousands from one victim; $6.99 once is a rounding error to them, and cards are not hard to come by. What a price actually filters is volume spam, and what it actually blocks is the person who has no card and no scam. That is the wrong way round.

So the door is a face. A live selfie in a pose we choose that day, matched against your photos, then deleted: nobody is in anybody’s deck without it, and no amount of money skips it. It is free, it takes twenty seconds, and it is the one check a person using somebody else’s photographs cannot pass. Money still buys the same thing it always did, which is the limits coming off: Gold, monthly or yearly. It just no longer decides who is allowed in the room.

Where the money goes

Moderators who read every report, the selfie-matching service that everyone uses for free, servers, and the app stores’ cut. Four people, no marketing budget, no growth team.

What we will never sell

Your data, your photos, your messages, your location, or a place higher in someone else’s deck. There is no version of Peatchy where paying more gets you seen more.

If you would rather not pay

Then do not. Joining, the selfie check and the deck are free, for everyone. A free account has limits on likes and messages, and paying lifts them. Nothing about being taken seriously here is for sale.