The apps in this space have either ignored the real complexity of relationships or sanitised it into something unrecognisable. Luvset is the alternative we went looking for and couldn't find.
Luvset started with check-ins that didn't quite land. Len, our founder, had been doing fortnightly check-ins for a while, loosely modeled on RADAR, the framework from the Multiamory podcast. They'd sit down together every other Sunday and work through the usual stuff. Family, work, money, needs, the relationship itself. The conversations usually went fine. It was everything around them that fell apart.
Neurodivergent, which translates to good intentions and a real talent for losing the thread between sessions.
Agreements blur. You decide something together over a glass of wine on a Sunday and absolutely intend to honour it. By the next month, one of you remembers the version where you said you'd talk before booking solo travel, and the other remembers the version where you said you'd give a heads-up. Both technically true. Both technically agreed to.
Boundaries shift over time, often without either of you noticing. The line you drew six months ago wasn't necessarily wrong, but neither of you went back to check whether it still fits.
Needs are trickier still. You ask for what you think you need, your partner does the thing, and it still doesn't quite land. Maybe you didn't ask precisely. Maybe the need shifted between asking and answering.
Even date ideas have their own version of the gap. The good one you thought of in the shower, forgotten by dinner. The Friday night question of “what do you want to do?” that nobody quite wants to answer.
None of it written down anywhere either of you could find.
So he went looking for a better container.
He tried the apps first. Some were too thin: a question of the day, no continuity. Some assumed a kind of structure that doesn't survive contact with actual life. And almost every one of them, somewhere in the onboarding flow, asked you to pick one of two genders or said something like “just for two.” If you've ever been a queer person opening one of those apps and reading those words, you know the feeling. That's a stance, and it tells you exactly what the product thinks of you.
It got confirmed in conversations with friends. People in the non-monogamous community who'd been doing this for years, in different shapes, with different partners. He asked how they kept track of agreements, how they handled their own check-ins, how they remembered what someone had said over coffee three weeks ago. The answer was almost always the same. Nobody had a good system. Smart, deeply intentional people were running their relationships out of the same scattered notes apps and shared docs everyone else was using.
That was the moment this stopped being a personal itch.
Len is a software engineer. Over 15 years building consumer apps at startups and at one of the big platforms, with a consistent obsession with making the experience actually feel good to use. So when “I should look for a tool” turned into “I should probably build the tool,” it was backed by 15 years of experience and a personal motive behind it.
What Luvset actually is
It's an app to help you manage your relationships. The whole picture. The difficult conversations and the small things you keep forgetting to bring up. A place where you can prepare for a check-in on your own time, share it cleanly with your partner, and find what you agreed to a month later, when it matters.
It holds the things that tend to evaporate. Needs. Boundaries. Agreements. The sentence your partner said back in February that you keep meaning to come back to. Right now those things live in your brain, or in someone’s notes app, and they vanish the moment life gets busy. Luvset is where they go instead.
We're building it for couples. We're also building it for triads, polycules, relationship anarchists, and anyone whose connections don't fit a “two people, one form field” template. Whatever your relationship structure looks like, the product doesn't ask you to defend or explain it.
What Luvset isn't
A few things worth being clear about. Luvset isn’t therapy, and we'd never pretend otherwise. We're not licensed and we're not trying to replace anyone who is. If you're in something that needs a professional, please go find one. We're a tool for the practical bits of running a relationship, not a substitute for the harder stuff.
It certainly isn't a dating app. We're not in the business of helping you meet strangers or optimise a profile for visibility. The relationships are already in your life. We're trying to help you take care of them.
It isn't a gamified prompt machine. We've used those apps. They're fine for a week. They don't survive the moment you actually need them.
On inclusivity
This part matters more than the marketing language usually allows. When we say inclusive, we don't just mean ENM-friendly. We mean built for the queer community from the start, not retrofitted later. We mean the app shouldn’t ask you to pick a gender from two options or quietly imply that anything outside a particular default is an edge case. And it should fit you regardless of how you identify, full stop.
ENM is a core focus for us and we'll keep saying that out loud. The broader point is that we're trying to build something useful for any relationship that's trying to grow, regardless of who's in it or how anyone in it identifies.
On security, because it matters
People are going to put genuinely sensitive information into Luvset. Things they haven't told anyone else. Things that, if leaked, would damage real relationships and real lives. We take that seriously.
A lot of the time we've spent on this build has gone into the security model rather than features. That's a deliberate trade. Shipping a slightly thinner v1 with a foundation we trust is better than shipping a richer v1 we'd be nervous about. We'd rather move slower and have you trust us than move faster and not deserve it.
We'll write more about the specifics closer to launch. For now, the principle is simple. Your data is yours, the protections behind it are real, and we're treating “is this safe enough for my own relationship?” as the test bar.
Where we are right now
The foundation is there, the rest isn’t quite. We're roughly a month or two from beta. The pace is mostly down to the security work and the slow craft of making the product feel right. A check-in flow has to be something you'd actually want to open on a Sunday morning, not another inbox demanding your attention. That kind of polish takes longer than a hackathon weekend, and we'd rather take the time than ship something half-cooked into the most private part of someone’s life.
If you want to be notified when the beta opens, the waitlist is live on the site. If you want to follow along while we figure this out, ask questions, push back, see what we're actually shipping, you'll find us on socials. Send this to a partner or a friend who might want to know it exists. That’s how the next stage gets shaped.
For the record, we're not therapists. We've never claimed to be. What we are is people who think the apps in this space have either ignored the real complexity of relationships or sanitised it into something unrecognisable.
Luvset is the alternative we went looking for and couldn't find.