A pen-pal app where a letter takes days to cross real distance — and you can see how often someone replies before you write. Free on the web and Android.
I built Letterway because I missed getting a real letter from another person.
The core of it: a letter takes as long to arrive as the distance is far. Write to someone in the next town and it lands in a few hours. Write to someone 11,000km away and you're waiting days. There's no way to rush it, and that one constraint changes how people write: you say more, because you know it'll be a while before you say anything else.
The other thing I care about: you can see how often someone actually replies before you write to them. Nobody should spend an hour on a letter to a person who has never answered one.
I'll be upfront: a pen-pal app isn't a new idea and I'm not claiming to have invented the category. Where I'm trying to go is the part I haven't seen done properly: letting you send that same letter on actual paper - printed, stamped, posted to a real letterbox, with the recipient typing their own address so the sender never sees it. That isn't built yet, and I'd rather say so than imply otherwise. Right now I'm working out whether enough people want it to justify the months it would take.
So far there are 135 letters moving between 33 countries, from people who found each other here. It's small, and I've built nearly all of it alone, but it works and people keep writing.
On safety, since it's the first thing I'd ask about any stranger-to-stranger app: blocking and reporting are built in, there's a house-rules page, and no profile carries a location more precise than a jittered city-level pin.
The question I'd most like answered: what would make you trust a stranger enough to write to them properly? Almost everything I build next depends on that answer.
Free on the web and on Android. Thanks for taking a look ❤️
Hey Product Hunt!
I built Letterway because I missed getting a real letter from another person.
The core of it: a letter takes as long to arrive as the distance is far. Write to someone in the next town and it lands in a few hours. Write to someone 11,000km away and you're waiting days. There's no way to rush it, and that one constraint changes how people write: you say more, because you know it'll be a while before you say anything else.
The other thing I care about: you can see how often someone actually replies before you write to them. Nobody should spend an hour on a letter to a person who has never answered one.
I'll be upfront: a pen-pal app isn't a new idea and I'm not claiming to have invented the category. Where I'm trying to go is the part I haven't seen done properly: letting you send that same letter on actual paper - printed, stamped, posted to a real letterbox, with the recipient typing their own address so the sender never sees it. That isn't built yet, and I'd rather say so than imply otherwise. Right now I'm working out whether enough people want it to justify the months it would take.
So far there are 135 letters moving between 33 countries, from people who found each other here. It's small, and I've built nearly all of it alone, but it works and people keep writing.
On safety, since it's the first thing I'd ask about any stranger-to-stranger app: blocking and reporting are built in, there's a house-rules page, and no profile carries a location more precise than a jittered city-level pin.
The question I'd most like answered: what would make you trust a stranger enough to write to them properly? Almost everything I build next depends on that answer.
Free on the web and on Android. Thanks for taking a look ❤️