FAQ

A consented, opt-in directory of the households within walking distance of your door — faces and names first, so the person walking their dog past your house every day isn't a stranger. It's the trust layer a neighborhood is built on: borrowing, emergencies, and block parties all start with knowing who people are.

Nextdoor collapsed every distance into one town-sized feed and monetized attention. IRL Corner keeps rings structurally separate — your Corner (the ~20 homes you could walk to) never shares a feed with the whole town — and there is no feed, no ads, and no data for sale at all. We build cohesion between people who live 200 feet apart, which is the one thing Nextdoor never did.

Yes — IRL Corner is a phone-first app, because it lives on the phone you carry down the street. It's in active development, with a web companion alongside it.

Yes, free for neighbors. The app sustains itself through small, flat local sponsorships — a banner, never an ad — and never by selling your data.

We're starting with one dense street in Delmar, NY and expanding by pull, not push — a neighbor sees a block party and asks to found the next Corner. There's no open signup into an empty Corner. Tell us where you live and we'll let you know when a Corner near you can form.

You can't start one alone — and that's the feature. Founding a Corner takes you plus two other households joining at creation, which means physically walking to two neighbors and doing it together. The whole thing is designed to happen on a phone, standing in a driveway, in under five minutes.

With a vouch from two verified members — “Yes, that's Josh at the blue house, I've met him.” Vouching is an accountable act: the app records who vouched for whom, and a pattern of bad vouches degrades the voucher's standing.

Because the community is the verifier. Identity-API lookups (credit-header and address databases) systematically fail renters, recent movers, and young people — exactly the people who most need neighborhood connection. A neighbor's vouch proves personhood, residence, and being actually known; a postcard only proves you can fetch mail.

Yes. The unit is the household, but individuals within it have their own profiles and their own consent over what they show. Renters, roommates, and adult children are all vouchable.

A verified member can be flagged, and removal takes a quorum — the founder plus others — designed so it's hard for one grudge to eject someone, but easy for a Corner to remove a genuine bad actor. The safety verb here is “Remove,” never “Block.”

We treat it as the most serious thing in the system, because it is. So the architecture minimizes data — every field is opt-in per person, we store the minimum, we keep no verification evidence (no IDs, no bills; we verify, then throw it away), and we don't store precise home coordinates where a coarse corner assignment will do.

No — structurally, not just as a policy. There is no advertising system your neighbor data could flow into. No data sale, no data sharing, no ad targeting. It's written into our founding documents.

That's the most sensitive object in the system, so it's the most protected — visible only to your Corner, auto-expiring, never shown in a notification preview, and never stored beyond its window.

Children never have profiles. A parent may mention their kids in their own profile text, at their own discretion — nothing more.

Like the hardware store's banner on the Little League outfield fence — a quiet, fixed “supported by” surface. Flat pricing, non-exclusive, priced so a one-truck business shrugs and pays. No feed insertion, no push, no boosts, no bidding, no targeting, no data. A place, never a voice.

The same way everything else is verified — neighbors vouch. “I've used them; it's actually Dave's shop; Dave lives on Elm.” Radius can't tell you (the PE-owned shop keeps the local name on purpose), but neighbors know when the local plumber sold out.

Yes — that's a channel we're building toward: the association or builder brings IRL Corner in, every resident is free, and there are never any ads. Email us and we'll talk.