We belong to ourselves. And that's staying that way.

The pattern we know

Mesh was acquired by Automattic. Clay was sold to ServiceTitan. Accompany to Cisco. Brewster was shut down. Humin was sold to Tinder and discontinued. Each time, users faced the same situation: an app they had invested months or years in changed hands — and with the new owner, often came a new data policy, new pricing model, new roadmap.

This isn't an accident. Venture capital has a structural exit imperative: investors need returns, returns come through acquisition or IPO, acquisition almost always means a new owner with different goals. Apps funded with VC that manage personal data carry this risk from day one.

We don't want that risk. So we ruled it out from the start.

How Endearist is funded

Endearist is privately funded and bootstrapped. No venture capital, no angel investors with equity, no acquisition discussions. The company belongs to its founders — completely, with no external stakeholders expecting an exit.

The business model is deliberately simple: you buy the app once, we build an app good enough that you want to. No monthly subscription obligations tying us to a user base metric. No investor to whom we need to report "user growth" or "monthly active users." No pressure to monetize your behavior.

This isn't a romantic pose. It's a rational decision: privacy-first and VC are structurally hard to reconcile, because VC needs an exit and exit usually means someone with different priorities takes over.

What happens if we sell anyway

Honesty first: we can't rule out that the situation looks different in ten years. So here are concrete guarantees for the scenario where we turn out to be wrong.

If Endearist is ever sold, the following applies irrevocably:

• 90 days advance notice. We give at least 90 days notice before any ownership transfer takes effect. Enough time to export all your data and decide whether you want to continue.
• Full export available throughout. During the notice period, the full export flow is guaranteed to be available — Markdown export, SQLite file, everything. No shutdown before you've had a chance to export.
• Open-source release of the core. The app core and data format spec will be released as open source on acquisition or closure, under a permissive license. No proprietary lock-in after the lights go out.

The same applies if we close without an acquisition — same rules, same timelines. If we stop existing, your data continues to exist. In a format you can read, convert, and import into any other app.

What we can't promise

We can't promise to exist forever. Small independent software companies sometimes fail — for economic reasons, personal reasons, reasons we can't foresee today.

What we promise: if that happens, you'll have everything you need to move on. Your data, your format, your code. Endearist can die — your relationship history doesn't have to.