FAQ

MYSOVA is live now on both stores in the UK — the Apple App Store at https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/id6768984093, and Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysova.app. It is free to download with a free tier, so you can clock in, earn XP and climb ranks without paying anything. London is the launch city, but you can download anywhere and follow along until your city opens.

Share your personal referral code or invite link from inside the app. When a friend joins with it and clocks in at their first venue, you get +500 XP and they get +250 XP. There is no cap on how many friends you can bring, and every verified referral also helps you climb the weekly leaderboard. Referrals must be real humans — self-referrals and throwaway accounts do not count and get stripped out.

The free-subscription ladder is counted from your first friend: 1 friend = 3 days of Explorer, 3 = a week of Explorer, 5 = a week of Icon, 10 = a month of Explorer, 25 = a month of Icon, 50 = 3 months of Icon plus a Co-Founder badge, and 100 = a full year of Icon. Explorer is £7.99/mo and Icon is £14.99/mo, so the ladder is real money off — earned by bringing people who actually show up and clock in.

You open the app at a venue, clock in, and earn XP. XP levels you through 10 rank tiers from Owlet to SOVA, with Ultimate SOVA the apex at level 99. Strangers you shared a venue with on the same night appear in Paths — if you both tap CROSS, it becomes a Crossed Path and a conversation. Each morning the Owl assembles a Night Recap: your route, your zones, who you crossed, how much you climbed. Oracle is the AI layer that suggests where to go next based on the crowd, your profile, and your night so far. That is the loop.

Paths is not a dating app. It is not your standard dating model, no swipe deck, no distance slider, no pool of strangers, no endless feed. It only ever surfaces phone-verified people who were clocked in at the same venue as you on the same night. Same room, same night, real humans, that is the only qualifying filter, and it is what kills the bots. You see their card, rank, handle, a few shared moments, and you tap CROSS or PASS. If you both tap CROSS, it becomes a Crossed Path and you can message. If one of you passes, the other never finds out. The scarcity is the product.

Yes. Launch is London-only on purpose, 2,400+ curated venues across 17 zones, from Soho to Shoreditch to Mayfair to Peckham. We wanted every zone to have real coverage before we added a single new city, because half-baked expansion is how nightlife apps die. Manchester, Bristol, Berlin, Amsterdam and Lisbon are all on the 2027 list, in that rough order. If you are not in London, you can still download the app and follow along — when your city opens, existing members get early access first.

MYSOVA is live now on the Apple App Store and on Google Play in the UK — you can download it today on either. It is built in React Native on Expo, so iOS and Android ship from a single codebase with no Android-as-afterthought lag. No web version, no Instagram DM fallback, no SMS hack — the app is the product.

You earn XP on every verified clock-in. Base XP is weighted by zone, Soho, Mayfair and Shoreditch clock-ins are worth 1.5× because those zones are denser with MYSOVA venues. Streaks, first-in-zone, late-night windows and Crossed Paths all stack multipliers. There are 10 rank tiers, Owlet, Local, Regular, Scene Maker, Night Owl, Pathfinder, Tastemaker, Phantom, Legend and SOVA, running across 99 levels, with Ultimate SOVA the apex at level 99. The weekly leaderboard resets every week and the top 5 win free Icon or Explorer time. The curve is intentionally steep at the top.

You choose your @handle in the app when you create your account — first come, first served, no reserving ahead of time. Pick one you like at sign-up. If you want to change it later, handle changes are a paid-tier perk (Explorer or Icon) so people cannot squat on ten usernames each. Grab the one you care about when you sign up.

By default: your friends, and people who shared a venue with you that night (through Paths). Everyone else sees only your public profile, rank, handle, badges. No clock-in history, no venue list, no patterns. Phantom Mode flips one switch and makes you invisible to Paths entirely, you can still clock in, earn XP, see your own Night Recap, but strangers never see you cross. You can toggle it per-night. You can flush your history at any time from Settings. You own the receipts.

No. MYSOVA is not a dating app. There is no geographic radius setting, no search, no pool of profiles to swipe through, no browsing strangers. The only way another human ever appears in your Paths feed is if the two of you physically shared a venue on the same night and you are both phone-verified. That is a hard constraint at the database level, not a setting, same room, same night, real humans only. It occasionally produces Crossed Paths, because humans cross paths. That is a side effect, not the premise.

Hard 18+ only. Every signup goes through an age gate before account creation, and suspicious accounts go through additional verification. We do not host under-18s, full stop, not even with parental consent. Some venues on the roster are 21+ and that is enforced at the door by the venue, not by the app. The app will flag 21+ venues in the feed so you do not waste a tube fare. Fake age = account terminated + IP banned. It is not a clever line to cross.

Built around UK GDPR. MYSOVA LTD is registered with the ICO. You can export everything we hold on you, clock-ins, Paths, messages, XP history, as a JSON bundle, any time, from Settings > Privacy. You can delete your account from the same screen, and we treat that as a UK GDPR Article 17 request. Deletion triggers a 30-day soft retention for legal and fraud reasons (chargebacks, safety reports) and after that every row with your identifier is either deleted or irreversibly hashed. No shadow profiles. If you want it gone, it goes.

Only what the product needs to work. Email, handle, age-gate answer, device push token. When you clock in, we record the venue ID and a timestamp, we do not store your precise GPS coordinates, only a rounded bucket tied to the venue polygon. There is no persistent background location tracking. No ad SDK. No third-party analytics that can see user-level events, we use Vercel Analytics for aggregate traffic and platform-level error logs (stripped of PII), and that is it. We do not sell anything. We do not share with advertisers. There is nobody to share with, we do not have advertisers.

Solo founder. PV, Estonian, based in London, sole director of MYSOVA LTD. Ten-week build from first commit to launch. React Native on Expo, Next.js on Vercel, Supabase on the backend. No team, no agency, no ghostwriters. The code, the brand, the venue outreach, the trademark filings, the HMRC paperwork, all one person. If you email hello@mysova.co.uk the reply is from PV. That is partly the appeal and partly a constraint we will be hiring out of later this year.

Founder-funded. No VC, no angel round, no pre-seed, no accelerator. MYSOVA LTD (Companies House #17154283, registered 2026-04-13) owns everything, the codebase, the trademarks (word mark UK00004373417, owl mark UK00004373474), the domains, the brand. That setup is deliberate. Zero dilution at launch means the product can stay honest, no ads, no growth hacks forced in by investors, no pivot-to-enterprise panic after 18 months. If it needs capital later it will raise it on its own terms.

Subscriptions. Three tiers, rendered from the same structure the app enforces: Free £0 — The whole map and the whole game: all 2,400+ venues, clock-ins, XP at 1.0×, ranks, Paths, Phantom Mode, Night Recap, Owl Questions, the public leaderboard, 3 Oracle questions a day, and parties of up to 3. Explorer £7.99/month — Everything in Free, with XP at 1.5×, 10 Oracle questions a day, parties of up to 5, 3 Super Cross-Backs a day, deeper Paths filters, and full share cards. Icon £14.99/month — Everything in Explorer, with XP at 2.0×, 30 Oracle questions a day, parties of up to 10, 10 Super Cross-Backs a day, and priority Paths. Paths and Phantom Mode are on every tier including Free — Paths is photo-gated, not tier-gated — and no tier caps how far you can rank. There is no ad inventory. There is no data sale. Subscriptions are the entire business model. We would rather a smaller app full of people who chose to be there than a larger one full of people we dragged in with ad impressions.

Partially. Every one of the 2,400+ launch venues is listed free, they were chosen on merit, not wallet. PV is approaching every one personally to bring them on board. Soon the platform will be irresistible to venue owners, and that is when the real power kicks in: venues become the ones giving real love back to people directly, boosts, drinks on the house, priority queues, hidden moments, perks routed through the app to the people who actually showed up. The dashboard side (photos, events, featured moments, zone sponsorships) is a paid product for venues, separate from whether a venue appears in your feed or gets good Oracle scores. No pay-to-rank, no paid clock-ins, no buying your way up the Night Owl rankings. The ranking logic is public. If a venue ever pays to bend the feed, it will be labelled "sponsored" in full caps, no exceptions.

Email hello@mysova.co.uk. It is a real inbox monitored by a real person, usually a reply within 4 hours during London working hours, always within 24. For press there is a full kit at /press (fact sheet, quotes, logo pack). For a bug at launch, use the in-app Help screen so we get device context. For anything else, venue partnerships, investor conversations, a question you cannot find the answer to here, just email. The tone is casual. No PR templates required.