Before you look at a single app, write down names.

The list will be shorter than you think. In a survey of 2,000 UK adults who use social media, people named about four they would turn to in a crisis and about fourteen close friends.1 Those are the people this is for. Three questions take you from the whole directory to the two or three products that fit them.

Who do you want to reach?

If your list is a handful of names, look for a tick on the Audience row: you invite people by name, and nobody else can look in. That is most of the directory: the letters, the photo circles and private talk. If you miss the wider crowd, the open feeds keep a public timeline without the ranking, and their cards say what that costs.

The big apps now offer mostly neither. By Meta’s own figures, 7% of the time Americans spent on Instagram in January 2025 went to posts from friends.2

How often do you want to hear from them?

The Pace row answers this. A tick means editions or a schedule: a letter once a month, a photo journal once a week. A tilde means whenever, but built for answering later. A cross means as it happens.

Slow sounds like less, and it is: less to check, and nothing to check in between. An edition has a last page. Read the Notifications row with it: a product that moves as it happens is more likely to want to tell you so.

Will they install an app?

Ask them before you ask the app store. In a 2025 Pew survey, one in six Americans aged 65 and over had a mobile phone that was not a smartphone.3 The Works on row says what each product needs. Some need nothing installed at all: DearAll and TogetherLetters work by email, and Letters to Grandma takes stories by text and posts a printed newsletter.4, 5, 6

Try this

Write down the names and answer the three questions. They will narrow the directory to two or three cards. Pick one person and one product from them, and give it a month. If the letter, the album or the video went somewhere the feed never did, you have your answer.

Start with what you want to do. We make one of these products, DearAll, and it is marked as ours.