OpenWhen - For Intentional Lovers

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition

What I Built

OpenWhen is a love letter app for intentional lovers. I built it around a simple belief: passion does not just live in grand gestures or big moments, it lives in the quiet rituals that help two people feel close, seen, and remembered.

The app lets two partners create, receive, and experience love letters with mood and ambience. It was originally inspired by a personal gift I once wanted to make many years ago, but never finished. This competition gave me the reason to finally turn that idea into something real.

Love letters are a lost art, I wanted to capture the feeling that it evokes and use technology to help bring that art back in a more immersive way.

How To Use

• Sign up as a user using magic link, no password.
• Invite your partner to Open when
• Partner accepts invite & signs in.
• Start sending letters.

Demo

open-when-web.vercel.app

Code

Queen-esther01 / OpenWhenWeb

OpenWhen is a love letter app for intentional lovers. It helps two people create and share letters with mood, ambience, voice, and timing built around the feeling they want to send, not just the words on the page.

OpenWhen

OpenWhen is a love letter app for intentional lovers. It helps two people create and share letters with mood, ambience, voice, and timing built around the feeling they want to send, not just the words on the page.

The project started as a personal gift idea I wanted to build years ago, and this competition gave me the reason to finally bring it to life. The goal is simple: help people feel closer by making love letters feel more immersive, thoughtful, and alive.

What It Does

• Creates private love letters between two people.
• Lets a sender pair a letter with ambience and voice.
• Locks letters until the right moment, then opens them on a schedule.
• Sends email notifications and reminders when a letter is ready.
• Supports a soft, romantic experience designed around intimacy rather than volume.

Demo

Live app: https://open-when-web.vercel.app/

How I Built It

• Next.js 16 with the Pages…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

I built OpenWhen with a focus on emotional experience and lightweight infrastructure.

• For voice, I used ElevenLabs to add a more intimate and expressive layer to the experience.
• Supabase handles authentication and the database, and I also used it for the cron job that checks for letters that are ready to send. - For email delivery, I used Resend(users get emails when locked letters are ready to be read, when a letter is sent, when a partner joins, as well as standard auth workflow emails).

The voice preview were text-to-speech voices downloaded from Elevenlabs and hosted on cloudinary to avoid downloaded heavy files. The ambience sounds are downloaded from pixabay.

The main design goal was not to have AI write the whole letter. The intention is for the letter to still come from the heart, while the product helps set the mood, tone, and atmosphere. I ran out of time before I could add AI-powered spell check and vibe check, building support for more complex relationship structures like multiple partners or connection revocation workflows and adding supabase realtime for letter delivery. Those are the kinds of features I would want to add next.

Prize Categories

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Thank you!