We built boopr for what Instagram used to be: a feed of the ~30 people you actually text, in the order they posted, and nothing else.
Facebook in 2007 was your college friends. Facebook in 2025 is Reels from accounts you've never heard of, served by an engagement model that Meta's own internal research flagged as harmful. Instagram is the same story. Stories, For You, Suggested Posts, follower counts: none of those features exist to help you talk to the people you actually know.
Snapchat is the same model at smaller scale. Roughly 90% of Snap's $5.4 billion in 2024 revenue came from ads, including Sponsored Snaps that now land in your chat inbox above messages from real friends. Turning those off costs $15.99 a month on the Platinum tier. The disappearing-message app keeps your My AI chats indefinitely, processed by OpenAI — the company has been under an FTC privacy decree since 2014 for misrepresenting how its disappearing messages worked.
Meta clears well over $150 billion a year selling ads against your friends' wedding photos. Snap clears another $5 billion the same way. Keeping you scrolling past strangers, or charging you to opt out of ads they injected into your inbox, is the business model. It isn't a bug.
We wanted something smaller. Open the app, scroll the posts from the 30-ish people you actually text, close it. Thirty seconds and you're out. No For You tab, no suggested posts, no follower count to check.
Engagement scoring, suggested posts, public follower counts: the features that make feeds worse are technically impossible when the server can't read what you post.
Every post and photo is encrypted on your device before it reaches our servers. The keys live on your phone, not ours. We can only ever hold ciphertext. There is nothing on our side to decrypt.
Free accounts get 25 invite codes. boopr+ accounts get 100. You spend those on people whose posts you actually want in your feed. There is no public signup, no "request to join," no search by phone or email.
No ads, no data sales, and no outside investors asking for a growth curve. boopr+ is $9.99/month or $79.99/year; the free tier covers everything social: posts, photos, boops, audiences. If nobody subscribes, we lose money per user and have to figure that out. Ads as a fallback aren't on the table.
There's a scene near the end of Superbad where Jonah Hill and Michael Cera are lying side by side in a basement, and Jonah Hill reaches over and boops Michael Cera on the nose. That moment, basically.
A few years back one of us went through a blackout-drunk phase of doing exactly that to friends and family at bars to annoy them. "boop!" The phrase stuck around long after the phase did.
When we needed a name for a one-tap, photo-or-video-to-a-specific-friend feature, the verb was already there.
It isn't a creator platform. There is no way to grow a following on boopr, no public profile, no Discover tab, no Spotlight feed. Posts go only to the people you explicitly invited and added.
It isn't a dating app, a business marketing channel, or a public broadcasting tool. If you're trying to reach strangers, find new fans, sell products, or post for "engagement," you'll be unhappy here. The app is intentionally bad at all of that.
No venture capital, no acquisition plan, no engagement team. boopr is self-funded; the servers come out of savings. The only long-term plan is to still be running in 2040.
We've been using boopr daily for months — posting to the feed, sending boops, and building the app on it. Launch is August 15, 2026: feed, posts, profiles, boops, invites, and push, all in one build.
Self-funded indie apps fail more often than not. We're planning for boopr to still be running in 2040, but you shouldn't have to take that on faith. Your 24-word recovery phrase already restores your account, posts, and profile on a new device. A full encrypted-data export feature is on the post-launch roadmap; when it ships, the bundle will be readable independently with that same recovery phrase. The crypto format is documented standard primitives (XChaCha20-Poly1305, Ed25519, X25519, HKDF), not a proprietary container.
iOS and Android. Invite-only. Ask someone who has a code.