Frequently asked questions

A few things, but the biggest one is that beau. is built around the idea that the same person wants different things. Most existing apps pick one mode and ask you to live inside it. beau. has three headspaces (friends, play, dating), and you can be in one, two, or all three at once, and change them whenever you like. It isn't a label on your profile, it's what you're here for right now, and it's allowed to change.

We also designed against the things that have made other apps feel bad to use. Silent rejection becomes friendzone, a real button with a real message. Not every photo is automatically public (your spicy photos need a mutual unlock). People aren't reduced to filterable categories (no age, race, or body-type fields as primary traits). And the surveillance-style design of “saw your view, here's an upsell” is mostly absent: screenshots are blocked, views are minimal, mutual friends are private.

We're not trying to replace every app for everyone. But if you've ever logged off a similar app feeling worse about yourself than when you opened it, beau. is trying to build something that doesn't do that.

beau. is built by and centered on gay men. That's our home base, the community we know best, and the place where most of our culture and design instincts come from. We're honest about that.

Anyone 18+ is welcome here. Plenty of people on beau. are bi, trans, queer in other ways, or somewhere on a path they haven't named yet. The app skews gay-male in the same way a neighborhood bar might, but the door isn't locked. If you want to connect through energy, intention, and shared culture rather than through demographic filters, you're in the right place.

Our ethos is rooted in the long tradition of queer community, curiosity, and authentic connection. We want people to connect through energy, personality, interests, intentions, and shared culture, not through the kind of rigid filtering and surface-level assumptions that have shaped so many social and dating platforms.

We believe deeper connections aren't defined by assumptions or fixed demographic categories. While we ensure everyone is 18+ for safety, we intentionally avoid displaying things like age, race, or standardized body-type fields as primary profile traits.

We're not trying to erase identity. We're trying to create space for people to define themselves more humanly.

Because they let you express who you are without being sorted by who you are. A tag like “leather,” “plant dad,” “drag race,” or “cottagecore” tells someone something true about your world without flattening you into a filter. They're chosen, not assigned. They change as you change. And they connect you to other people through the actual stuff you care about, not through demographic overlap.

Behind the scenes, tags are also how our match scoring works. We don't rank people for you by face or by proximity to a beauty norm. We surface people whose tags hint at chemistry with yours, weighted by the headspaces you share with each person, using whichever one you fit best. It's not a perfect system, but it's pointed in the right direction: connection through substance, not surface.

Your headspaces are what you're here for: friends, play, dating, or any mix of them. You can be in one, two, or all three, and you change them any time with the ring button at the top of Home, Explore, and Events, or from your profile. You see everyone in your headspaces together, in one feed, and you're seen only in the ones you're in: leave play and nobody sees you there until you come back. It's not a label, it's where you're showing up, and it's allowed to change.

We built it this way because people aren't single-mode. The same person can want a real relationship, want play, and want community, sometimes all in the same week, sometimes even in the same hour. Forcing a choice at signup and locking it in forever is one of the most dishonest things social apps do.

Because you see the side of someone you share a headspace with. If friends is the only headspace you two share, you see their friends side: those photos and prompts, and no spicy tags. Share play or dating and those sides come through too. The headspace chips on a profile list what you share, and on Explore a ring around each face shows the same thing at a glance. It's not censorship. The profile owner chose everything that's on there. It's just that not every part of someone is relevant to every context.

It works both ways: what you see of them is exactly what they see of you.

Whatever's on your mind, in a few lines: up to 280 characters, with an optional photo, a song, and a place. The song comes from a search of Apple's catalog and plays a 30-second clip right in the feed. The place is a venue or a city, never a street address. Photos are screened the same way profile photos are, and a public one stays clothed. If you're in Play, the flame marks a post spicy: a spicy photo is encrypted, only people you've mutually unlocked photos with can see it, and it lives in the feed only, never in your profile gallery.

Some things post themselves, quietly: a new public photo, a song added to your playlist, a Space you favorited or added a photo to, a public event you're going to or hosting, landing in a new city. Spicy changes, changes to your headspaces, and your relationship status never do. Delete a photo from your profile and it leaves the feed with it.

Your posts also live on your profile. The Feed button in the bar on any profile opens that person's posts, newest first, and yours works the same way. To delete one, swipe it and tap Delete. It can't be undone, and a spicy photo goes with it.

The same people who can see your profile. A post follows every rule a profile does: the headspaces you share with the reader, their blocks, and their Not For Me list. When you post, you can keep it to some of your headspaces, and a reader sees it only if one of those is a headspace you two share. A spicy post goes only to people you share Play with. The one exception is an answer you share from your profile, which keeps the headspaces you set on the prompt.

The feed is chronological, newest first, and the lenses along the top are the only sorting there is: All, Following (the people you follow), Same Energy (people who share your tags), and your city or region. Nothing is ranked, nothing trends, and nobody is boosted.

Two things, depending on where your phone is. The tag itself is a label, a venue or a city, never a street address, and anyone who can see the post sees it. If your phone is actually there when you post, at the venue or in the city, the post is also your Out Now for the next three hours: you show up in the Out Now rail, on the venue's Space page and in its “here now” count, on your own profile, and the post itself says “here now” while it lasts. If you're not there, it's just a post about a place. There's no toggle. The tag plus your phone is the whole question.

After three hours the presence lapses and the post stays, an ordinary located post. To end it sooner, tap the X on your status (on Explore's Out Now tab, the Space page, or your profile) and the presence ends while the post remains. You're only ever out at one place at a time, so a new tag replaces the last. Sensitive places like bathhouses are Play-only, so a post tagged there shows only to people you share Play with. An expired status is kept on our side for 30 days in case someone files a report about it, then wiped.

All three, from a swipe on someone's post. Hide takes that one post out of your feed, for you only, silently, and there's no undo, so it's for the post you don't need to see twice. More opens Report and Mute. Mute means you stop seeing that person's posts: they still see yours, nothing is sent to them, and you can undo it any time in Settings under Muted in feed. It's one-way and feed-only, not a Not For Me and not a block, so nothing else between you two changes.

Report asks what's going on (spam, contact info or a scam, harassment, explicit in Friends, or something else) and sends it to a person on our team. Reporting doesn't hide the post for you; swipe and hide it if you'd rather not look at it while we work. The author is never told who reported them, and if we take a post down, they keep seeing their own words while everyone else stops. Someone who learns exactly where the line is just writes around it next time.

Spaces are pages for real places. The bar, the club, the café, the park, the bookstore. Nobody sits down and creates one. A Space appears because someone attached activity to it: a status posted from there, an event thrown there, a regular adding it to their favorites. The page exists because people are already using the place, not because a business signed up for anything.

On a Space you'll find who's out there now, upcoming events and the ones that just happened, photos people have posted, and a map. Anyone signed in can add a photo, and those photos are public, so they stay clothed the same way your public profile photos do. If someone reports a photo, it hides immediately and a person on our team reviews it. That means one bad-faith report can pull a photo down for a while. We'd rather over-correct than leave something ugly sitting on a venue's page until we get to it.

Who you see at a Space follows the same rules as everywhere else on beau.: your headspaces, your blocks, your Not For Me list. Some places carry more risk than others. Bathhouses and cruise spots are flagged sensitive. Sensitive Spaces take no photos, never get shared out of the app, only show up in the Local Spaces rail when you're in play or dating, and are never checked into automatically, even if you have auto check-in turned on. If one is a favorite on your profile, it follows the same rule spicy tags do: only people you share play or dating with see it.

Anyone can throw one. A house party, a hike, a bar night, a show: you post it, people RSVP, and if it's at a real place it shows up on that Space's page too. You can share an event into any of your chats, and the people going can see each other there.

beau. picks are public events around you that our editors pulled in because they're worth knowing about. They're not ours and we're not affiliated with them. We just point at them. On the free app you see events within 10 miles. beau.plus opens the full map.

DTF is our word for “I'm interested.” It's a quiet signal, not an announcement. The other person doesn't see it until they DTF you back, at which point you both find out at the same time. There's no read receipt of rejection, no leaderboard of who liked who. If it's mutual, you'll know. If it isn't, nobody's keeping score.

The name is a wink at where the culture came from, not a description of what it has to mean. People DTF each other for friendship, for dates, for play, for “I want to know you.”

Because the moment one person knows the other is interested without that interest being mutual, the whole dynamic warps. The person who knows starts performing, negotiating, holding out, or chasing. The person who doesn't know is, in effect, putting on a show they didn't sign up for. We've all been on both sides of that, and it's never made anyone feel better.

On beau., DTF is silent until it's mutual. You tap because you mean it, not because someone tapped first. When it's mutual, you both find out together, on equal footing. It's a small thing that changes the texture of the whole app.

It is, and we mean it sincerely. Friendzone on beau. is what you tap when a conversation is real and good and you want to keep it, just not romantically or sexually. The other person gets a clear, kind message that you'd rather be friends, and the thread keeps going if you both want it to. You'll still see each other in Friends if you're both in it, and you stop seeing each other's Play and Dating sides, while the chat stays. It's the opposite of ghosting.

We reclaimed the word on purpose. Friendship is not a consolation prize. Some of the best people in our lives are people we once dated and then didn't.

Not For Me is a quiet way to take someone out of your feeds without blocking them, without telling them, and without telling yourself a story about it. You tap NFM on a profile and pick the headspaces it applies to (friends, play, dating, or some combination), and you stop seeing that side of each other. A line under the checkboxes tells you exactly what will happen, like “You'll still see each other in Friends.” It works both ways. If you NFM someone for play, neither of you sees the other's play side, and anywhere else you share stays as it is. The checkboxes start unchecked on purpose, because we don't want you flipping someone off the app in a half-second.

The scope depends on whether you've ever DM'd them. If you haven't, you can NFM across all three lanes, which is essentially a soft, reversible full hide. They disappear from your feeds and can't DM you. If you have DM'd them, NFM caps at two lanes. Taking someone you've already engaged with out of every feed isn't a soft mute anymore, that's a block, and block is the right tool for severing an active relationship.

Nobody is ever notified that you used NFM, and you can undo it from Settings whenever you want.

Exactly what you'd want. You lose that side of each other and keep the rest. If you NFM someone for play, neither of you sees the other's play side, but if you're both in friends or dating, you still see each other there. If play is the only headspace you share, you won't see each other at all until that changes. And it lasts: if one of you joins play later, the NFM is still there.

The whole point of per-lane NFM is that “I don't want to date this person” and “I don't want this person in my life at all” are two completely different sentences. Most apps collapse them into one button. We don't.

Because being blocked without knowing why is its own kind of harm, and we've all been on the receiving end of it. On beau., if you block someone for a behavior reason, they see a short, factual note about why. They can't reply, they can't see your profile, they can't come back, but they're not left wondering.

Safety blocks (the kind you reach for when something is actually wrong) are silent and instant. The reason-block is for the in-between cases, the ones where a person could learn something. We think this community deserves better than ghosting dressed up as a safety feature.

Yes. On any profile you can follow someone from the action bar. It's the mellow option: nothing to accept, no count anywhere. They get one quiet notification that you followed them, and if a few people follow them close together, one line for all of them. The people you follow get their own Following lens in your feed, with no distance limit, so a friend who moved away stays in your day.

You can see who follows you from your own profile, and nobody else can see either list. If you follow each other, their profile says so in a quiet caption and nothing more. Unfollowing is silent. Follow notifications have their own switch in Settings. Following is separate from DTF, friendzone, and Not For Me, and a block removes it in both directions.

Direct messages and group chats are end-to-end encrypted, which means they're encrypted on your device with keys only you and the people you're talking to hold. We can't read them. Our database can't read them. If we ever got a subpoena for the contents of your chats, we wouldn't have the contents to give.

Photos are different. Every photo, public or spicy, is screened for safety the moment it's uploaded, which means our server sees it once. Spicy photos and photos sent in chats are then encrypted and stored with a key we throw away, so they're unreadable at rest. Public profile photos and event covers stay readable, because everyone who sees your profile needs to see them. None of this is end-to-end the way messages are, and we'd rather say that plainly.

Because your messages are end-to-end encrypted, the key that unlocks them lives on your device, not on our servers. That's what keeps them private. On iPhone, the key is part of your phone's own backups, so restoring an iCloud backup (or an encrypted backup from your computer) onto a new iPhone brings your conversations with it. Setting up a new phone from scratch, or moving between iPhone and Android, needs message backup turned on first.

Message backup (in Settings) gives you a 12-word recovery phrase. beau. uses that phrase to encrypt a copy of your key and store it as scrambled data we can't read, so your backup is only ever as reachable as your phrase. On a new device, enter the 12 words and your message history and group chats come back. Keep the phrase somewhere safe, like a password manager: it's the only thing that can unlock your backup, and we can't recover it for you if it's lost.

On iPhone, if you have iCloud Keychain turned on, beau. can also tuck the key that opens your backup into it, so moving from one iPhone to another restores your messages automatically, with no phrase to type. On Android, Google Block Store does the same when you set up a new Android phone. That same-platform auto-restore is a convenience on top of the phrase, not a replacement: your 12-word recovery phrase is the universal way to restore on any device, including when you move between iPhone and Android. Either way, none of this lets us read your messages: the backup is just an encrypted copy of your key that only you can open.

A face photo is preferred, and the norm around here because who doesn't like to see who they're talking with. But we know there are plenty of legitimate reasons someone can't put their face on the internet, and we'd rather you be here than not. One photo is required to finish setting up your profile, and as long as your profile represents you and who you are, it's good to go. It's a vibe, not a photoshoot.

What we do ask is that you don't upload photos of people who are not you. That's not cool. Impersonation, fake profiles, and catfishing get accounts removed.

If something about a profile doesn't add up, whether from a report or a pattern we notice ourselves, we can ask you for a selfie. Someone on our trust and safety team compares it against your profile photos, and the selfie is deleted once the review is done, unless the account is banned.

Every photo uploaded to beau. is screened before it's stored, no exceptions. Anything that appears to involve a minor is blocked and never stored. Where the law requires it, we report it and keep only a record of the report.

If a photo just shows nudity, we ask you to move it to your spicy set, where adult content is allowed and only people you've mutually unlocked photos with can see it. Public-facing photos stay clothed. Spicy photos can be whatever you want them to be.

Every profile can have a separate set of spicy photos, the private set. They're only visible when two people have independently unlocked them for each other. A mutual DTF does not unlock photos. A photo unlock does not imply DTF. They're separate decisions on purpose, because “I'm interested in you” and “I want you to see me undressed” are not the same sentence.

Either person can revoke access at any time, and revoking cuts both directions. The photos themselves are screened once at upload, then stored encrypted with a key we don't keep.

Spicy tags are how people signal kinks, play styles, and the more adult parts of who they are. They only show between people who share play or dating, never through friends. If you're only in friends, or friends is all you share with someone, neither of you sees the other's spicy tags. Join play or dating with the ring button and they show to the people you share it with.

The friction is on purpose. Friends shouldn't leak that information about anyone. It's not censorship, it's context.

If two people share friends in common, we'll tell you how many. We won't tell you who. Outing your friend group to a stranger isn't a feature, it's a leak. The number is enough context to know there's overlap. The names are not ours to give.

How we know there's overlap at all is worth explaining. If you grant beau. permission to read your phone contacts, the phone numbers travel to our server over an encrypted connection, where they're hashed with a secret key that never leaves the server. Only the hashes get stored. The raw numbers are never written to disk. Plain hashing alone wouldn't cut it (phone numbers are short enough that a generic hash can be reversed in seconds), but the server-held key closes that gap. Even someone with full access to our database couldn't turn a hash back into a number.

Two users overlap when their contact hashes overlap, and that's the only signal behind the mutual-friend count on a profile. Your contacts aren't shown to anyone, aren't shared with other users, and you can wipe them from Settings whenever you want.

Because the people on beau. didn't consent to being screenshotted. Profiles, photos, chats, none of it should leave the app without the other person knowing. We block screenshots and screen recording across the entire app, with no per-screen exceptions, using the protections iOS and Android provide. No software can stop someone photographing a screen with another device, so share with people you trust.

If something happens that you want us to act on, use the in-app report flow on the profile. If you also want your own evidence outside the app, photograph your screen with another device.

beau.plus is the paid tier. It unlocks seeing who viewed you, more people in Nearby instead of your nearest 150, advanced filters, unsending messages and photos, read receipts, more photo slots, and the full event map past the free 10-mile radius. The free app is genuinely usable, on purpose. We don't gate the things that make beau. beau.

Two reasons. First, beau. is built and run by a small team, and we don't take ad money or sell data. beau.plus is how we keep the lights on without compromising the experience for everyone, and “see who viewed you” is one of the things we put behind that line because it's a quality-of-life feature, not a core one.

Second, knowing every view changes how people behave. If every time you peeked at a profile were broadcast back, you'd peek less, or you'd peek with intention you didn't actually have. We keep the casual look casual on free. If you want the full picture, beau.plus has it.

When you sign up, right after your birthday, there's an optional screen asking whether a friend sent you. If someone gave you an invite code or link, drop it in and your first month of beau.plus is on us, courtesy of your friend. If nobody did, tap I don't have a code and keep going. Nothing about joining depends on it.

Your friend gets a month too, once you've stuck around for a week. That's the whole program: a month for you, a month for them, never cash, and nobody earns more than twelve months in a year. Invites can only be added when you first join, so if you have one, that screen is the moment. Your own code lives in Settings under Invite friends.

Yes. beau. comes in two: warm coal and warm paper. Out of the box it follows your phone, dark when your phone is dark and light when it's light. If you'd rather it stayed put, Settings has an Appearance row with System, Light, and Dark. Your accent comes along either way: your headspace's color when you're in one, and sage when you're in more than one.

Some of our early visual materials use AI-generated imagery alongside photography, illustration, and design work. We use it intentionally: to protect privacy, experiment creatively, and avoid presenting staged models as “real users.”

beau. is independently built and self-funded, without outside investors shaping the product or brand. Right now, we'd rather spend our resources building the best app possible than burning money on polished ad campaigns.

That said, we know AI generated images can feel cringe. As the community grows, we commit to collaborating with local photographers, artists, designers, and real members of the community. Supporting queer artists and building something authentic matters to us more than looking like a venture-backed startup pretending to be a community.

Anywhere in the United States, yes. Earlier versions opened one city at a time behind a zip code, with a waitlist for everyone else. That gate is gone. The app doesn't ask for a zip code anymore, and you can sign up from wherever you are.

What changes from place to place is how many people are there. A community-rooted app is only as good as the density of the people in it, so if you're one of the first in your town, expect a quieter feed and fewer people nearby for a while. That's day one, not a verdict. Post, tag where you are, follow a few people, and bring a friend.

And to be upfront: beau. is United States only right now. It's a legal and safety thing, and we'd rather do one country right than many countries badly.

Still on the earlier version, the one that asks for a zip code? Its doors are open everywhere now. Open now: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Coming soon: nowhere left. The whole country is open. Or update the app, and the question goes away.