Lantern Post · A note from the founder
A Lifetime of Songs. A Little Light Worth Keeping.
A new kind of birthday gift, a very human idea, and an invitation to help keep it free for everyone.
· Lindsay Hiebert · lanternpost.app
There is a song somewhere in your past that can take you back faster than a photograph.
Three notes, and you are in that old car again. Or the kitchen where someone used to sing. Or the summer you thought would never end. Music has a way of keeping the parts of our lives we didn’t know we were saving.
Now imagine opening a birthday card and finding not one song, but a song for every year of your life: the number-one hit from the week your birthday came around, year after year, all waiting behind a small glowing lantern.
Not just “happy birthday.” A lifetime you can listen to.
That is the newest surprise inside Lantern Post. It takes about a minute to give. It can take someone much longer to finish smiling.
The moment they receive it
A link arrives from someone they know. They open it and find a quiet, starlit greeting card. A few words unfold on the front, a warm turn of phrase waits inside, and, if you wrote one, a line from you.
Then a brass lantern appears. They tap it. Light moves across the page, and the surprise is revealed: a birthday playlist stretching from the year they were born to this one.
A 30-second preview plays each year’s song right in the card, with no app to install and no account to create. They can jump between decades, stop at a year that matters, and follow a link to Apple Music or Spotify for the full track.
Maybe they land on the year they graduated. Or married. Or became a parent. Maybe they hear a song they loved, one they never liked, or one they haven’t thought about in decades. That is part of the magic: the memories belong to them, not to an algorithm.
One birthday. Every year. No homework.
You enter a birthdate. Lantern Post does the digging. For each year, it takes the first Billboard chart dated on or after that birthday and selects the number-one song, then puts the years in order. Before the Hot 100 began in August 1958, it uses the charts the Hot 100 grew out of, all the way back to Billboard’s first national chart in July 1940, so even a parent or grandparent born before then gets a playlist from 1940 on. The same rule applies all the way through.
Behind that simple gesture are 4,498 weekly charts and 1,385 different number-one songs, each matched to its original recording wherever the catalog carries it, and a check that every birthday year is accounted for before a card can be sealed. I wanted the hard work to happen here, so the person sending the gift could focus on the person receiving it.
You can see the whole playlist before you send it, write your own line and P.S., and share the finished card by text or email. No subscription. No code. No payment. Free to send and free to receive.
Why this little thing matters to me
My working life is spent around technology, AI, governance and security. I believe in the power of those tools. I also know how easy it is to use technology to make everything faster while the human part quietly disappears.
So I drew a line. Lantern Post can make the card beautiful, find the music, check the links, and light the lantern. It will not write your personal message for you. Your line and your P.S. belong to you. Sending and opening a card involve no AI at all. The card artwork and card sentiments are created with AI and reviewed by hand before they ever appear in a card.
I also wanted the card to respect the person who receives it. No tracking pixels, no read receipts, no ads on our picks. Every hidden link is verified before it can travel: resolved to its true destination, matched against a strict allowlist of well-known homes, and screened with Google Cloud Web Risk. And a birthday playlist needs a birthdate, not a name or an email address.
The technology should carry the kindness, not pretend to be the person who sent it.
A birthday playlist is only one thing the lantern can hold. You can also hide a song, a story, a verse, or something else worth sharing. One card, one surprise, one person who matters to you.
The part you don’t see when the lantern lights
Lantern Post looks simple because a great deal of work is hidden behind the simplicity. I have built it, maintained it, tested it, added the new cards and experiences, paid the bills, and kept it running myself.
There is no large team behind the curtain. No investor funding the experiment. No advertising business paying for the lights. There is me, a belief that this small corner of the internet is worth having, and a real commitment of time, effort and money to keep it open.
I’m proud of what I’ve made. I’m also being candid: keeping something free for everyone is not free for the person doing the keeping.
I don’t want to turn a thoughtful gesture into a checkout. I don’t want a grandmother to need a subscription to hear her birthday songs, or a friend to pay to open a card someone sent with love. Lantern Post will remain free to send and free to receive.
But I would love for the work of keeping it alive to become something a few more people choose to share.
The people who keep the lamps lit
There was a time when lamplighters walked town streets at dusk, lighting one lamp after another. Most of the people who passed beneath those lights never knew who had tended them. They just saw that the way home was brighter.
Earl Nightingale put the plain truth of it in 1956: “We’ve got to put the fuel in before we can expect heat.” A light that is free to enjoy still needs someone to put in the fuel.
Most people will use Lantern Post for free, and that is exactly as it should be. A few will decide to be the reason it stays that way. If Lantern Post means something to you, I’m inviting you to be one of them: part of the crew, not as a customer buying something extra, but as someone who makes sure the next person gets the same gift, free.
A contribution on the Keep it lit page is $5. It buys no special access and unlocks nothing. There is no subscription. It helps pay for hosting, the safety checks, the artwork, and the ongoing work of one independent builder.
You are not paying for your own card. You are helping make the next person’s card possible.
That difference means everything to me. Supporting a free project before it is widely known is a quiet act of belief. It says: this is useful, this is kind, and I would like it to still be here tomorrow.
Join the crew — keep the lamps lit 🏮
Two invitations, both from the heart
The first is easy. Think of one person whose life has a soundtrack. Make their birthday playlist. Write a line only you could write. Send the lantern today, even if there is no special occasion to wait for.
The second is for anyone who sees the value of this and wants it to last. Visit Keep it lit. If you can contribute, please do. Five dollars cannot buy the feeling of being remembered, but it can help keep the place that carries that feeling open to everyone.
And if contributing is not for you, sending a lantern still matters. Sharing the light is the reason I built it in the first place.
I cannot know which song will make somebody laugh, stop scrolling, or call an old friend. I can build the little lantern that gives that moment a chance to happen. With a few more hands helping to tend it, I can keep building the next one, too.
A small light does not have to illuminate the whole world. It only has to reach one person. Then another.
Send a little light 🏮 Help keep it burning
Lantern Post was announced on the wire in September — read the press release or visit the press page. More from the founder: Send a Little Light, The Architecture of Light, and The Unexpected Has Been Expecting You.