Your relationship structure is a field, not a confession.

Alap is a dating app for people in open, polyamorous and negotiated non-monogamous relationships. You say how you are partnered when you sign up, the same way you say your age. Nobody has to explain themselves in line four of a bio and hope it goes well.

Opening in West Bengal, one area at a time.

Three things the product is built around

Structure is declared, not hidden

Solo, partnered and dating separately, partnered and dating together, still working it out — one of these is on your profile from the day you join, and you can change it whenever the truth changes. If you have a partner, they co-sign. Changing your structure is re-shown to everyone you are already talking to, because it is information they are owed.

Nobody sees your face until you have both written something

There is no grid of photographs to swipe. The first thing you see of someone is something they wrote. Photos unlock only after you have both replied — until then the server does not send them at all, to anyone. This is enforced in the code, not promised in a policy.

Discretion is engineered, not promised

Your phone's contacts never leave your device: your phone turns each number into an unreadable digest and only those are uploaded, so anyone already in your address book can be hidden from you both without us ever learning a number. You can hide yourself from an employer or a college the same way.

How you actually meet someone

You answer prompts

Around sixty of them, written in Bengali and English. They ask about how you negotiate, what you have got wrong, and where in this city you would rather be. They are not icebreakers.
You reply to an answer, or you pass

There is no like button. The only way to show interest is to reply to something a person wrote, which takes about ninety seconds of thought. That is the point: an approach that costs nothing gets sent a thousand times, and the people receiving them leave.
Photographs come last

Once you have both written, the photos open. By then you already know whether you can talk to each other, which is the part that decides it anyway.

Who it is built for

Not quotes from members — the app has not launched. These are the situations the product was designed around.

Married several years, opened up more recently, and it is going fine. A mother-in-law who visits on Sundays and two hundred people on the office floor she would rather not run into. She needs her photos hidden until a conversation exists, her employer blocked, and a co-sign on her profile so she is not read as someone cheating.

Bi, solo poly, out to friends and not to family, on a research stipend. Already deep in the city's queer collective scene and the person who will bring twelve others with him. He needs a free tier that is not crippled, gender and orientation as open fields rather than a binary, and prompts written in Bengali.

Married nine years, one toddler, both working long hours, and they want one profile between them rather than two pretending to be separate. They need the couple structure to be legible on the card so nobody is misled about who they are talking to.

What privacy means here, specifically

Kolkata's social graph is dense. A surname, a school, a college and a para will place a stranger inside two questions, and most people live near family or with it. An app that leaks identity here does not annoy someone — it costs them their life as they have arranged it. So the privacy work is the product, not a settings screen.

Your contacts never leave your phone. Numbers are turned into digests on your device. We never receive one and cannot reconstruct one.
Blocking is symmetric and invisible. If either of you is hidden from the other, neither appears. A block is indistinguishable from someone who was never there, so it carries no social cost.
Workplace and college blocks. Name where you work or study and you stop appearing to anyone who named the same place.
Photos sent in conversations delete themselves after thirty days, without anyone having to remember to do it.
Your data stays in India. The database, the photographs and the safety checks all run in one Indian region. Nothing is routed through an edge server in another country to make the app marginally faster.

What is free, and stays free

Eight replies a day on a free account. That cap is a design decision rather than a lever — it is what keeps the volume of approaches survivable for the people receiving them, so it is not for sale.

Verification is free for everyone. A badge you can buy is a wealth signal wearing a safety badge, and it tells you nothing about whether the person is real.

Not open yet

Alap opens one part of West Bengal at a time, starting in South Kolkata. A dense area with two thousand people is a living app; the same two thousand spread across the state is a dead one. There is nothing to download yet.