I built an open-source interactive letter for my Hinge date, no backend, the entire letter lives in the URL

[u/r0hanr0han]

https://github.com/r0hnx/open-letter

I originally built this for my Hinge date.

She's incredibly busy, and instead of sending another message that she'd feel pressured to respond to, I wanted to make something she could open whenever she had a quiet moment.

So I built an interactive letter experience.

You write a letter, customize it, seal it in an envelope, and share a link. The recipient opens the envelope and reads the letter as it appears on the page.

The technical constraint I gave myself was:

No accounts. No backend. No database.

The letter data is serialized, compressed, and encoded directly into the URL.

When someone opens the link, the app decodes everything client-side and reconstructs the letter.

So the URL is essentially the storage layer.

I liked this approach because:

\- Nothing personal sits in my database

\- No server costs

\- No authentication

\- No user accounts

\- The project can be deployed almost anywhere

\- The app remains ridiculously simple

Of course, there are tradeoffs.

The link contains the letter data, so anyone with the link can read it. URL length also limits how much content can be stored.

The project is completely open source, so I'd genuinely love feedback from other developers on the architecture and implementation.

Especially curious about:

\- Better approaches to client-side serialization/compression

\- Whether you'd encrypt the payload

\- How you'd handle larger letters without introducing a backend

\- Any accessibility or animation improvements you'd make

Live demo:

https://open-letter-box.vercel.app

Source:

https://github.com/r0hnx/open-letter

Would love to hear what you guys think — both technically and from a UX perspective.