The hard part of this product is restraint, not features

Hi PH. I'm building Atween, for married couples who have something real to say and nowhere safe to work it out. You write the thing you'd never send, work out a version you'd actually stand behind, and only what you approve reaches the other person.

It isn't released yet. There's no waiting list and I don't publish download counts.

What I did not expect when I started: most of the work has been deciding what the product will not do. No relationship score. No streak. No read receipts or typing indicators. No selling anything we learn about anyone. Each of those is a thing that would make the numbers better, and each one is out.

The website ships zero JavaScript — enforced by a content security policy, not by discipline. Same for the rules above: there's a check that fails the build if one of them quietly disappears from our own docs.

I'll mostly be here reading. If you're building something where the hard part is restraint rather than features, I'd like to hear about it.