What it is
Every network app stores who you know.
SpiderNet starts one step earlier: where you met.
That single difference changes what the app can know. A contact you typed in is a name. A contact that came from a real encounter carries a place, a moment and everyone else who was there — and that is what makes it possible, months later, to say why this person matters.
The chain
Most platforms build on what you publish. We build on what happened.
Social products chain identity to content: you are who you post. That works for audiences, and it is why they measure reach. Our chain never passes through content, so there is nothing to broadcast and no feed to optimise.
Most platforms
SpiderNet
Each link only exists because the one before it did. No encounter, no relationship to score. No context, nothing worth remembering. It is also why the app is quiet: there is no step in that chain that rewards posting.
The model
Seven inputs. Five of them anyone can get.
Being honest about this is more useful than claiming everything is proprietary. Most of what feeds the model is available to any app that asks for permission. Two are not: one is shipped, one is a plan.
| Input | Who has it | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts | Everyone | Who exists. The starting list, and the least interesting part of it. |
| Calendar | Everyone | What was scheduled. Note that a meeting in a calendar is an intention, not proof that it happened. |
| Proximity | Only us | That you were actually in the same room. It is the one input that cannot be reconstructed later, because it was never written down anywhere. |
| Memory | Everyone | What you chose to write down about someone. Yours, and portable. |
| Intensity | Everyone | How warm a relationship is right now. Computed from recency, frequency, reciprocity and depth — arithmetic anyone could copy. |
| Intent | Only us · future | What you are actually looking for, stated by you. Not built yet: this is the direction, written in the future tense on purpose. Nobody can infer it, and we will not try to. |
| Time | Everyone | Decay. A relationship you have not touched in a year is not the relationship it was. |
Why proximity is the one that matters. Contacts, calendars and notes all live in files, so they can be exported, bought or rebuilt. Proximity cannot: there is no file anywhere that records that the two of you stood in the same room on a Tuesday in March. It only exists if you were there, and only if something was running at the time. That is the whole reason the app has to be present at the moment, not afterwards.
Detection
How much of this works today, level by level.
This is the part of the category where everyone rounds up. Here is where we actually are, including the rung we have not built.
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0
Card, QR, link
Works today
A deliberate exchange. You hand something over and the other person takes it. No sensing involved, and it is what most of the category actually is.
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1
Contextual, app in foreground
Works today
With the app open, it uses where and when you are to put the right people in front of you. It suggests; you confirm.
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2
Nearby session, one tap
Works today
You start a session and the people around you who are also running one become visible. One tap to open it, and it stops when you stop it.
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3
Event mode, one tap with a clear end
In the code, not released
For a conference or a meetup: one tap at the door, and it ends when the event ends. The end is decided by the server, not by a timer on the phone, so there is no state you can leave running by accident. Built and tested; it ships with the next database migration.
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4
Physical infrastructure
Frozen
Hardware in the venue doing the sensing, with nothing to open and nothing to tap. We have not built this, we have deliberately paused it, and we are not selling it. Nothing you can install today does it.
So the promise is the one we can keep, and it is deliberately smaller than the one you have probably been offered elsewhere: when you open the app at an event, the world comes in on its own. You open it. That part is still you.
Calibration
What you would leave behind if you left.
We would rather say this plainly than bury it, because it is the honest answer to "what locks me in?" — and because the first half of it is a promise we intend to keep.
The longer you use SpiderNet, the better it understands your relationships. Your data is yours to export, whole. What cannot be exported is the judgement, because judgement is not a file.
Today the export is an email to support and you get JSON or CSV; a one-click version is not shipped yet. What stays behind either way is the calibration built from how you corrected the system along the way.
Get the app
Free on iPhone.
The App Store version is the whole product, not a trial. Android is coming; there is no date worth quoting yet, so we are not quoting one.
Still deciding? See who is building it — two founders, in production since May 2026.