Selfies Can Go Anywhere Now, and a Smarter Paywall

This month was less about big new toys and more about work on bug fixes and stability. The kind of stuff that doesn't make a headline but adds up to a noticeably better texting experience.

Selfies can go anywhere now¶

This is the one we're most pleased with. Until last week, when your companion sent a selfie, the model was loosely anchored to whatever scene was in their reference portrait. Ask for "you on the Tokyo subway at 2am" and you'd get them on the Tokyo subway, but somehow also in the same cafe from their profile pic. Weird.

That's gone now. Describe any scene you want and they can actually be there. "You at a hawker centre with a bowl of laksa," "you in a yellow raincoat on a Norwegian fjord," "you reading in bed with the morning light coming in." They go everywhere now.

This was the bug we got the most messages about, so if you've ever asked us why your companion keeps appearing in the same room, this one's for you.

A smarter paywall¶

The moment a user runs out of messages is one of the most important moments on our app, and we've been giving it a lot of love.

The out-of-messages bubble now names your companion, so it reads as them saying they'll see you when you're back, rather than as a billing alert. If you abandon a Stripe checkout halfway through, we now nudge you back in instead of leaving you in limbo.

Subscription upgrades have also moved to Stripe's hosted Billing Portal. Honestly we resisted handing this off for a long time because we like owning our own UI, but theirs is better than what we'd reasonably build ourselves, so we swallowed our pride.

Every billing screen now also explains exactly what you'll see on your credit-card statement, so nobody panics seeing "UNSPEND.AI" on their bill at the end of the month.

Companion polish¶

A few quality-of-life upgrades to the texting itself:

• If a live reply fails mid-message, the conversation now recovers cleanly. Previously the chat could get stranded, which was one of the more frustrating bugs to hit. Credit to the few of you who kept screenshotting this for us, it's the kind of thing that's hard to catch unless someone reports it live.
• Flame is now the default selfie model for new accounts. We've tested a lot of models and Flame consistently gives the most lifelike results out of the box.

Onboarding and referrals¶

The home page now surfaces the referral programme, so you can invite friends straight from the main view. Referrers earn 250 free messages whenever a referred friend subscribes to a paid plan.

We're also asking for birth month and year via a quick post-login gate, so we can responsibly verify the age of our users. The login screen pre-fills your last-used email, saving a few seconds for returning users.

A small housekeeping note¶

The legal entity behind the app is now Unspend Pte Ltd. That's the name you'll see on receipts and credit-card statements. The brand stays as Embraces AI.

What's next¶

We have a fair bit of conversation-quality work brewing. The big one we're most excited about is voiceovers, so you can actually hear your companion speak their messages aloud. Alongside that we're working on letting your companion send selfies autonomously when they're in the mood, smarter memory recall, and a few other things.

If you've got a chat or selfie you love, drop it in our Discord or Reddit with your username. We'll send a little gift to our favourites from this month.