Lantern Post
Lantern Post is a free digital greeting card with a secret inside: you light a card and hide a verified reveal — a song, a story, a verse — and the person you send it to taps a glowing lantern to open it. No account, no app, nothing to install.
About a minute, start to light. The words are already written, the links are already safe — you bring the person and the reason.
They open your link. The card unfolds — the hook on the front, the warm twist inside, your line beneath it. Then a lantern appears: “...and I left something else for you.” They tap — the light floods, and there is the song you picked for them, with your P.S. underneath, in your handwriting. A beautiful sentiment, a hidden gift, and your reason — delivered in a link.
We have all hesitated before tapping a link in an e-card — e-card phishing is a real and common scam. Lantern Post is built so that hesitation never applies: every reveal destination is checked server-side against a trusted allowlist and screened against Google’s Web Risk threat lists before the card can be sent — and rechecked at click time. The link your recipient taps never carries a raw address at all, only a signed token that we can turn dark if a destination ever goes bad.
A lit lantern means the card is live — anyone with the link can open it. Put it out and the link stops working. For everyone, for good.
Permanent by default. Ephemeral the moment anyone decides it should be. Any one person holding a card can put it out — the link stops working and the words are erased. Nobody can put it back.
Ending it is unilateral. Keeping it is collective. No one party can guarantee a card survives; persistence just means everyone left it alone. That is the same shape as a confidence shared between people: anyone can break it, nobody can force it to hold. We set no timer and take no side — a keepsake whose link stopped working would be a defect, not a feature — so a card lasts until someone decides otherwise, and it is never us.
No tracking pixels, no rewritten links, no profile of your recipient, no analysis of what you wrote. Read the whole promise in plain language →
Every card someone sends you can be put out, by anyone who has it. The control sits on the card itself, under the reveal — one tap, and it goes dark for everyone. That includes anyone you forward it to, so if you share the link you are sharing that too. It cannot be undone from the card, which is what makes it worth having: a card someone doesn’t want can always be stopped by the person holding it.
Nothing. Free to send, free to receive. No subscription, no paywall, nothing to unlock. The light is the point.
No — never. They tap your link (or scan your QR), the card unfolds, they tap the lantern. No app, no sign-up, no anything. They just receive light. And you don’t need an account to send one either — your card’s link appears the moment you light it, along with a manage link that is yours to keep. Your card lives at its link — and if you’re not signed in, that link is shown once, so keep it, because we can’t look it up.
A song, a playlist, or something to read — an article, a poem, a quote, a story, a book. Choose from the pre-verified library, or paste a link from a trusted home like Spotify, YouTube, or Wikipedia and it’s verified before the card can travel. Every pre-verified pick is also ad-free by design: no ads play before the gift. Songs open on Spotify or Apple Music — without an account that’s a clean 30-second preview and a button to hear the whole song; with one, it plays in full. Some library picks, like a NeoAesop story, are free to read after a quick free sign-in — and the label always says so before anyone taps.
That’s the quiet innovation. Every reveal destination is resolved to its true final address, matched against a strict allowlist of well-known homes, and screened against Google’s Web Risk threat lists before the card can be sent — Every tap then re-checks the card and its destination; threat screening refreshes daily. If a destination is flagged unsafe, or the sender revokes the card, its light goes dark instead of leading anywhere unsafe. A destination that no longer exists is refused when the card is made, and one that stops existing later goes dark too.
A card is between two people. No tracking pixels, no rewritten links, no profile of your recipient, and we never analyze what your card says. We count lanterns, not lives.
Lantern Post is made by Lindsay Hiebert as part of the NeoAesop family — small, careful software about stories, gratitude, and light, alongside the books that started it all: The Wick of Wit and The Carried Light.
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