Why we built Parages

There is a very specific moment almost everyone has lived through at least once. You find out a good friend used to live ten minutes from your place, and you only learn it six months after they moved, over a drink, completely by chance. Nobody did anything wrong. The calendars simply missed each other again, and a friendship gathered dust for no reason at all.

For years, a little app called Zenly had a cure for exactly this. A map, your friends scattered across it, and that gentle feeling of knowing who was nearby without ever having to ask. In February 2023, Snap, which had bought it for close to $300 million, simply shut it down. From one day to the next, nearly forty million people lost the small daily habit they had built around it.

What rushed in to fill the gap got almost everything wrong. Life360, Find My, the Snapchat map: they all start from the same premise, sharing your real-time location, constantly, with a group. To make up for a lack of connection, they sold you surveillance instead. And plenty of people accepted it because there was nothing else on offer.

We came to think there was a mistake baked in from the very start. What people want is not to watch their friends move across a map like GPS dots. It is to avoid missing them when chance puts the two of you two streets apart. That is not the same desire, and crucially, it does not call for the same technology at all. To be told about a brief moment of nearness, you do not need to share your location with anyone.

So Parages takes the problem from the opposite end. You jot down where your friends live, by neighbourhood and never at the exact address, in a notebook only you can open. The app sleeps in your pocket. And on the day you pass close to one of them, it quietly drops you a note. That is all, and that is deliberately all.

The distinction is technical, but it changes absolutely everything. Nobody shows up on a public map. No history of your movements is ever kept. No location is sent off to a server. Your friends do not even need to install the app: they have no idea they are in your notebook, and you are the only one who knows.

We built Parages because we wanted to use it ourselves, without having to choose between seeing our friends again and getting tracked. Those two things should never have been tied together, and yet a whole industry was built on convincing you they were.

What made Zenly so endearing was never the technology, it was the tone. A colourful map, little bubbles, a playful streak that made you want to open the app for the fun of it rather than out of anxiety. The tools that took its place kept the map and threw away the lightness, swapping it for a logic of constant control. We wanted to bring that lightness back, but to rest it on foundations that betray no one.

The rest is just a small nudge at the right moment. "Léa is in the area, 250 metres away." It is up to you to decide whether you push open the café door or keep walking. The app does not judge you, keeps nothing, and tells no one. It simply hands back a chance the city would have quietly stolen from you.