Kuutti

Our purpose

Kuutti ry is a registered non-profit association in Espoo, Finland. Its purpose, in the words of its bylaws, is to promote safe, free and equal opportunities for everyone to meet other people and form relationships in Finland; to reduce loneliness; to support research into relationships and loneliness; and to keep an open community in which volunteers develop the service.

It was founded on 1 October 2026 and entered in the Register of Associations on 6 October 2026. This site, kuutti.app, is its official website. Its bylaws, in Finnish, are public.

About Us

What it does

Kuutti ry develops Kuutti, a free app for meeting people in Finland, and will run it itself: the bylaws forbid handing the service to anybody else. The work is done by volunteers and in public: the code, the decisions behind it and the work in progress are at github.com/kuutti-ry/kuutti-app.

The board runs the association: its members, its meetings and its books. Anybody who shares its purpose can apply to become a member.

Beyond the app

What the association builds for Kuutti, it shares. tunnistus-oidc is a free toolkit that lets other Finnish online services sign people in with strong identification, a bank or mobile ID, through Telia’s identification service. It is published under the MIT licence, so a public body, a non-profit or a company may use it without paying and without having to publish its own code. The association wrote it for Kuutti; it is not an official Telia product.

In the register

Name: Kuutti ry
Business ID: 3659478-7
Form: registered non-profit association (aatteellinen yhdistys)
Domicile: Espoo
Postal address: Tontunmäentie 22 E, 02200 Espoo, Finland
Postal address: Tontunmäentie 22E, 02200 Espoo, Finland

The association’s entry in the Finnish Business Information System (YTJ) shows the same.

Why

Services for meeting people are mostly sold in a way that pays the provider for the time you spend in the service, and not for the relationships that come of it. The longer you look, the better for the seller.

Kuutti ry is founded to offer such a service without that conflict of interest. It measures its success by how many people find what they were looking for and no longer need the service.

What the association may not do

The bylaws say what the association does, and also what it never does:

It does not sell advertising space or show anybody’s advertisements.
It does not hand over personal data of the people who use the service, or anything else gathered from its use, for commercial purposes.
It makes no agreements with companies whose business is dating services, and takes no money from them.
It pays no dividend and shares no surplus with its members.
It does not sell or pledge its name, its trademarks or its domains, and it does not hand the service or its accounts to anybody else.
It keeps the source code open under a licence that obliges others to do the same.
If the association is ever dissolved, the personal data of the people who used the service is destroyed, not passed on.

Changing these needs a unanimous decision in two meetings, at least thirty days apart.

Who we are

The board was elected at the founding meeting on 1 October 2026 and has three members. Its chair is Nikolai Denissov.

Volunteers: mostly alumni of Aalto University, and some who study there now.

To reach any of us, write to hello@kuutti.app, or see Contact.

Questions

Is it really free?

Yes. There is nothing to pay for in the app, now or later: that is in the bylaws, not in a price list.

Who pays for it, then?

The association may receive membership fees, grants, donations and bequests. Its funding may not depend on how much time people spend in the service.

So that every account is one real adult, and so that somebody who was banned stays banned. The bank confirms who you are and nothing else: Kuutti sees nothing of your account or your money.

Can I join the association?

Yes. A private person who accepts its purpose can apply to be a voting member, and a person or an organisation to be a supporting member; the board decides. How to join.

What does the name mean?

A kuutti is a seal pup, in Finnish. The logo is its face.

App

Kuutti is an app made in Finland for Finland . It is made by an association, not a company, and it is built so that it works best when you stop needing it.

Kuutti is in development, in public: the source code and the work in progress are at github.com/kuutti-ry/kuutti-app. It comes to the App Store and Google Play first as a beta.

What it is

Free. There is no subscription, nothing to buy inside the app, and no paid way to be seen more than somebody else.

Without ads. Kuutti shows no advertising and carries no advertiser’s code. The association’s bylaws forbid selling ad space.

One real person behind every account. You sign in with a Finnish bank’s identification, the same strong identification you use for public services. One person has one account, and it is for adults. A ban holds, because it is the person who is banned and not an email address.

Not a feed. There is nothing to scroll without end. Kuutti gives no scores to people, keeps no streaks and sends no notifications whose purpose is to bring you back.

Open source. Everything Kuutti runs on is published under the GNU Affero General Public License. Anybody can read how it works, and whoever changes it has to publish the changes too.

Yours to leave. You can download everything Kuutti holds about you, and you can delete your account in the app. How deletion works.

What it keeps about you, in short

Kuutti never stores your personal identity code, your name, your legal sex or your date of birth. It keeps the year and month of your birth, a code computed from your identity code that cannot be turned back into it, a record of your identification (which bank, and when), what you tell about yourself, and your photos, from which the location and the camera’s data are removed before they are saved.

The whole of it is in the privacy policy.

Research

Loneliness and relationships are studied too little with data that people gave knowingly. If you say yes, and only then, events about how you use Kuutti are kept under a separate identifier for researchers. They never contain what you wrote to anybody, and you can withdraw at any time.

How it is built

Kuutti is built by volunteers, in the open, in one public repository.

The app runs on iPhone and Android and is written in TypeScript with React Native and Expo.
The server is written in TypeScript as well, and keeps its data in PostgreSQL.
The servers, the database and the photos are in the European Union, in Frankfurt.
Identification goes through the Finnish Trust Network, by way of Telia’s identification service.
The app speaks Finnish, Swedish and English, follows the text size and contrast you have chosen on your phone, and every decision in it is a button, not a swipe.

The source, the decisions and the open questions are at github.com/kuutti-ry/kuutti-app.

Membership

Kuutti ry has members of two kinds, as its bylaws set out (sections 3, 4 and 8).

Voting members

A private person who accepts the association’s purpose can be a voting member. Voting members have one vote each at the association’s meetings once they have been members for twelve months; the founding members voted from the start.

Supporting members

A private person or an organisation that wants to support the association’s purpose and work can be a supporting member. Supporting members may attend the association’s meetings and speak there, without a vote.

How to join

Write to hello@kuutti.app with your name and the kind of membership you apply for. The board decides on every application and answers you.

The annual meeting sets the joining fee and the yearly fee, separately for each kind of member.

What membership does not change

Being a member, of either kind, or not being one, makes no difference to anybody’s place or benefits in the app. That is in the bylaws (section 3).

A member can leave at any time by telling the board in writing; a voting member can become a supporting member the same way (section 12).

Contact

Write to us

hello@kuutti.app reaches the association: questions about Kuutti or the association, requests about your personal data, membership, and the press.

By post

Kuutti ry, Tontunmäentie 22 E, 02200 Espoo, Finland.

Kuutti ry, Tontunmäentie 22E, 02200 Espoo, Finland.

Business ID 3659478-7. The association’s entry in the Finnish Business Information System (YTJ) has its register details.

Elsewhere

The association is on LinkedIn, GitHub, TikTok and Instagram.

Anybody can propose a feature, and help build it: open a proposal on GitHub.

Legal and privacy: The association's bylaws, the terms of use of the app, and how personal data is handled.
Deleting your account: How to delete your Kuutti account and your data, what goes at once, and what is kept and for how long.
Help: Where to turn when something in Kuutti does not work, and how to report a problem or a person.
Support us: How to help Kuutti - as a member, with your time, and why the association asks the public for no money.