About Troupy
Troupy exists for one reason: to help people meet in real life.
Our philosophy
Not to keep you on your phone. Not to sell your attention to advertisers. Not to engineer habits that benefit us at the cost of your wellbeing. We win when you put the phone down. That is our only metric of success.
There are no boosts, no super-likes, no "950 people viewed your profile" counters, no push notifications engineered to trigger anxiety, and no pay-to-win mechanics. Everyone gets exactly the same experience.
We are not funded by advertising. Troupy is free to use right now, funded out of pocket by its creator, for as long as that stays sustainable. If it ever becomes too expensive to run that way, we will introduce one flat subscription set to cover hosting, maintaining and developing the platform, and nothing more: the same price for everyone, with our cost breakdown published every year.
Our open algorithm
Nothing about how Troupy decides what you see is hidden. Home has two streams, and these are the only rules behind them:
- My feed: posts and events from troupies you joined or starred, from the last two weeks. A post's score is (1 + votes + half its comments), divided by its age, with a 30% boost for troupies you starred and up to 2× for activities you picked in your profile. Events you're going to come first, then the soonest.
- Discover: everything else around your home base. Posts score (1 + votes) divided by their age, multiplied by your activity match, and divided by distance (1 + km ÷ 10), so closer always shows more. Events rank by how soon they are and how close.
- Your activities decide the mix, not what you're allowed to see. If you picked activities, 5 of every 6 Discover posts match them; the rest are deliberately something different.
- Discover looks within 25 km, widening to 100 km if there isn't enough, and never further.
- People are never ranked. No secret "desirability" score, no shadow banning, and no way to pay for more visibility.
How troupies live and end
A troupy exists only while it has momentum. It is deleted, with everything in it, if fewer than 5 members join within its first 6 months, or if no one posts in it for 30 days in a row. Members see a countdown before that happens. No ghost towns: just groups of people who actually show up.
Free to join, for people
Nobody can charge anyone to join a troupy or come to its events: no tickets, no entry fees, no paid memberships. A troupy can meet at a café or a bowling alley and everyone pays for their own coffee or game; what nobody can do is make people pay to be part of it.
Giving back to your city
If we ever introduce a subscription, part of the profit will go back to local associations in the cities where our members live: running clubs, community gardens, cultural organisations, youth programmes and amateur sports leagues.