Gader turns the cafés, parks and studios near you into small, easy ways to meet people who happen to be free, right now, for the same thing as you.
Hands have warmth, eyes have stories. Gader is built on a simple belief: places and moments are still the most natural way for two people to become friends.
A coffee at 11. A river walk at 18:30. Board games after work. Open the app, pick a moment that fits your day, and just show up.
Real bonds, like family ties or school friendships, grow from shared memories - not transactional encounters. Gader is built for the second kind.
Most apps wait for you to type. Gader lets you choose a place and time that already fits your day - and quietly invites people nearby who could join.
A walk, a coffee, a knitting hour. Micro-events stay human-scale: easy to start, light to join, perfect for repeat.
Research shows it takes a handful of shared moments to move from stranger to friend. Gader makes those moments easy to come back to, with the same people.
The café around the corner becomes a place to meet, not just sit alone. Local venues become quiet social anchors for the people living around them.
No swiping. No long forms. No algorithm guessing who you are. Pick what you'd like to do today, and Gader helps the rest happen.
Coffee chats, board games, river walks, language exchange. A handful of taps: no long bio, no photos required.
A short list of small, real moments around you. Walking distance whenever possible. Time-stamped, public, low-pressure.
Tap to join. Or open a moment of your own in under 30 seconds - Gader quietly tells nearby people who might like it.
The same walk, the same Tuesday, often the same people. That's where strangers turn into familiar faces - and friendships begin.
Gader's job is to fade. The clever bits live behind the scenes, so you can focus on the table, the walk, the conversation in front of you.
Gader is more than a startup. It works hand in hand with the Dutch organisations and municipalities already strengthening neighbourhood life - so what we build adds to their work, never replaces it.
Its cost lands on five circles at once. Gader is built to be measurable in each of them.
A crowded room is not company. What is missing is a way back to the same faces next week.
Neighbourhoods hold the cost first. Venues, libraries and welfare organisations already do this work, we add to it.
Loneliness drives GP visits and mental-health demand. A recurring circle is somewhere to refer people, and something to report back on.
Employers lose people who never land socially. Quiet hours cost venues. Both are measurable, both are fixable.
Municipalities must report on loneliness and have little that is measurable to buy. We instrument the repeat-encounter rate, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
Free for the people who join. Paid for by the circles that carry the cost.
Three of the seventeen UN SDGs that Gader directly contributes to through its work in Dutch communities.
Three sides, one exchange. Each side gives what it has and receives what it lacks - nobody is asked for the one thing they cannot give.
Lonely people have no budget for another app - but they have presence, and presence is the product. Joining and hosting stay free, with no cap. Showing up, coming back, and honest answers to the loneliness scale power everything the other two sides build on.
Hosts, welfare organisations and venues give Gader a trusted place inside their own customer journey. In return they get a free backstage: event pages, reminders, QR check-in, a report on their regulars. They can also earn - collecting fees for their own paid activities, with Gader keeping a small percentage only when money actually moves.
Municipalities, health insurers and housing corporations already carry the cost of loneliness. They buy the one thing no one else can sell them: measured loneliness reduction, per district, in the government's own instrument - the De Jong Gierveld scale, at zero, three and six months.
Value for Access - how the organizer side scales
Loneliness damages outward through five circles. Gader makes the money flow back inward.
What we shipped and where we stand - dated, verifiable, updated as we go.
Gader enters the We Are Changemakers facilitation program on 22 September 2025.
On 23 April, seven architecture decision records set the technical course: native Android plus a web app, a shared Kotlin core, iOS to follow usage.
23 to 25 April: security, rate limiting and push infrastructure made ready for more than one platform.
Legacy code retired and a shared cross-platform core built, with 86.6% automated test coverage.
The web app goes live at app.gader.nl in five languages, installable on iPhone - alongside a redesign of nineteen screens.
Circles, organizer mode, follows, event reminders and QR check-in ship on both platforms - plus full GDPR data export and account deletion.
First working session with the Popdistrict at the Grote Markt in The Hague on 18 June, recurring since. In Kralingen, Rotterdam, weekly anchor gatherings are running. The venue layer is in development.
On 17 July we register with Movisie's regional learning networks on loneliness. The Android app is live on Google Play, the web app at app.gader.nl.
After moving here for work, I joined a Tuesday river walk on a whim. A year later, half the people on that walk are in my phone. It quietly became my Amsterdam.
I made a knit & coffee at my favourite café in the Jordaan. Eight people came the first time. Now it runs every other Sunday and feels like a small living room.
I'm an analyst who used to gym alone. Now I'm in an "evening power walk & photography" group on Tuesdays. Better photos, better legs, three real friends.
Built to fade into the background - so the actual meeting takes the foreground. A clean home, an interactive map, a single tap to join.
Free. Android & web today, native iOS coming soon. No noise, no swiping. Just a calmer way to meet the people already around you.
android · web (works on ios too) · native ios soon
