The Frae Blog
Dev notes, product thinking, and honest writing from the team behind Frae.
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The boring pattern that means you actually get your invites
If you are invited to something on Frae, you find out. Not usually, not when the network is having a good day. You find out. The unglamorous machinery that makes that promise keepable is called the transactional outbox.
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How we renamed a live app without breaking a single link
We renamed Happening to Frae and promised users that not a single link would break. This is the engineering behind that promise, including the twenty minutes where I broke it myself.
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Happening is now Frae: same app, new name
The app you know as Happening is now called Frae. Your account is the same account, your events are the same events, and every link you have ever shared still works. Here is why we changed the name.
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Frae comes to iPhone - and Sign in with Apple lands everywhere
Today we submitted Frae to the Apple App Store, and shipped the update that makes every platform equal: Apple and Google sign-in everywhere, push notifications on both stores, and one invite link that does the right thing wherever it's opened.
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How to plan a group trip when no one's calendar agrees
Group trips don't die because people stop wanting to go. They die at the dates stage, months before anyone argues about Airbnbs. Here's the method that actually works.
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The best Doodle alternatives for friend groups in 2026
People keep asking us "so it's like Doodle?" and the honest answer is: sort of, for about a third of what Doodle does, and hopefully much better for that third. Here's a fair comparison of the tools people actually use to pick a date.
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What we learned shipping Frae v1
Frae v1 shipped last month. This post is the retrospective I wish more product teams would publish: the bits that worked, the bits that didn't, and the things I'd do differently if I were starting again tomorrow.
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Privacy by design: how Frae handles your event data
The fastest way to lose someone's trust is to be vague about their data. So this post is the opposite of vague: it is a complete walkthrough of what Frae stores, where it lives, who can see it, and the things we deliberately chose not to do.
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The math behind finding a date everyone can make
On the surface, Frae looks simple. Friends tap the dates they can make, the app surfaces the best date, the host picks. But the moment you start writing the algorithm down, you realise it isn't simple at all.
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Group dinners shouldn't take 50 messages
I went back through my messages last week and counted. Organising one Saturday dinner with six friends had taken 73 messages over four days. Nothing was booked at the end of it.
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Why we built Frae
A few years ago I sat in a group chat with my oldest friends, all of us doctors, trying to pick a date for a party. After 45 minutes of back and forth we gave up. Not one date worked for everyone in the next four months. That was the evening I started thinking about Frae.