About us
Ruh Eşi is not out yet. This page covers what we are building, why we chose the name we did, and the reasoning behind the decisions that shape the matching — instead of team photos and testimonials.
Why we started this
Making friends as an adult is hard in a way nobody warns you about. At school and university it happened by itself: the same people, the same place, over and over, with nobody organising it. Work ends that. You move city, your hours change, the people you used to see every day get married, move away, or run out of time.
Then you look at the apps and there are two kinds. Dating apps, which create a clash of expectations the moment you use them for friendship. And event apps, which match calendars rather than people — you go, you come home, you did not actually meet anyone.
What sits in the gap is a very plain question: where do I find someone who likes what I like and can talk about it for three hours? Ruh Eşi exists for that question.
Ruh Eşi is not a dating app. That is not a positioning line, it is a decision baked into the product: the score measures shared interests and how closely your approaches line up, not romantic fit.
Why we are called Ruh Eşi
There is a tension in the name, and we would rather point at it than hide it. “Ruh eşi” is Turkish for soulmate, and in Turkish it is a firmly romantic, slightly fatalistic phrase: there is one person out there, waiting to be found. We are not a dating app, and we are not selling destiny.
We kept it because what the phrase really describes is not romance. It is being understood without having to explain. Laughing at the same thing at the same moment. Someone finishing the sentence you left hanging. For most people, the strongest version of that happens with a friend rather than a partner.
We want the word back for friendship. English got there already: people call their closest friend a soulmate and nobody blinks. Turkish still keeps “ruh eşi” almost entirely in the romantic register. We think the word deserves better.
So the claim is not just a slogan: there is no dating flow in the app. The compatibility score does not measure romantic fit; the questions are about interests, everyday habits and how differently people approach things. The filters are not on a romantic axis either: basic age and radius are there on the free plan, and the advanced filters open up with Ruh Eşi+.
To be blunt: if you are looking for a romantic match, Ruh Eşi is the wrong app. Better to say that now than to disappoint you later.
The app is coming soon. Want to hear when it launches?
Get notifiedWhat we decided to do differently
Five decisions, all of them running in the product today. The decision and the reasoning are here; the detailed maths lives on the page it belongs to.
The same answer is not compatibility
The first design matched people who gave identical answers; we dropped it, because questions are not all of the same kind — some call for similarity, on some axes being complementary works better, some are dealbreakers. Instead every question carries an axis, and the score is the geometric mean of both sides' satisfaction: under an arithmetic mean, one-sided delight would still land comfortably in the middle. The full set of axes is on the How it works page.
Three questions will not buy you 100%
Someone who answered a handful of questions turning up at the top of your list destroys your trust in every percentage on the screen. So when you have few questions in common, the question part of the score is trimmed by a confidence factor; with three questions in common that factor is 0.27. How the factor is calculated is spelled out on the How it works page.
Your real location is never on the map
Your coordinates are rounded to three decimal places (about 110 m) before they are stored, and the point that gets shown sits inside a roughly 3 km cell, placed with a fixed offset derived from your account. Fixed is the important part: if it were random, anyone querying you a few times could average the readings and recover your real position. Distance comes back as a bucket rather than a number (“under 5 km”, for instance); the step-by-step version is on the Location privacy page.
Free users can always reply
The original plan was that free users could not write at all; the maths does not work, because then the person paying cannot talk to anyone either — whoever they message cannot answer. On the free plan you can start one conversation a week; replying to a message you receive is never capped. The full plan limits are on the Pricing page.
Photos are invisible until reviewed
Publish-first, review-later is smoother, but the first person to see a bad photo has already seen it, and that does not un-happen. So every photo is reviewed before it goes live: that means waiting after you upload, and we accept the delay deliberately. The rest of the moderation story is on the Safety page.
Where we actually are
Honestly: the app is not in any store yet, and development is ongoing. We are not giving a date either. When an announced date slips, the first impression you make is a promise you did not keep.
The company has not been founded yet. That is why there are no team photos, no job titles, no press logos, no testimonials and no user counts on this page. Rather than manufacture credibility we do not have, we decided to write down the choices we made and why.
What genuinely works today: sign-in with an email code; a question bank split into categories; interests, including suggesting one that is missing; two-way scoring, the confidence factor and dealbreakers; H3-based location with a fixed offset; blocking, reporting and photo moderation; in-app account deletion with a 30-day undo; chat, real-time messaging and notifications; Turkish and English.
Whenever we mention something that has not been built yet, it carries an “on the way” badge on this site. Anything without a badge works today.
On the way
Not everything we talk about is ready. Instead of quietly leaving those out, here they are in one list.
Selfie verificationOn the way
A selfie check confirming a profile is real is planned; the badge exists, but the flow has not been built on mobile yet.
Who viewed your profileOn the way
Profile views are recorded. The screen and the API endpoint that would show them to you do not exist yet.
Invisible modeOn the way
The permission to disappear from the map is defined, but there is no screen for it. There is nowhere to switch it on today.
Incoming requests screenOn the way
Connection requests can be sent; the screen where you see and accept the ones you receive has not been written yet.
Density viewOn the way
The area density view planned for free users is fed by data that is not being refreshed yet, so it comes back empty today.
Exporting your dataOn the way
You can delete your account from inside the app, but downloading a copy of your data is not possible yet.
Get in touch
Questions, suggestions, bug reports or press: destek@ruhesi.net. We reply to everyone who writes.
If you think one of the decisions above is wrong, write anyway. Several of them started out differently and changed once the reasoning convinced us.
More
Legal notice
Legal details, the responsible contact, and where the company stands today.
How it works
The maths behind a match: axes, the confidence factor and rarity weighting.
Location privacy
Rounding, the H3 cell, the fixed offset and distance buckets, step by step.
Pricing
What the free plan covers and what Ruh Eşi+ opens up.
Safety
Moderation, blocking, reporting and deleting your account.
Support
Common problems and the ways to reach us.
Meet people who like what you like
Ruh Eşi is not a dating app. It exists so you can meet people to hike with, listen to the same band with, and talk about the same thing for hours — and your exact location is never shown on the map.