A plain, fair crossword app, launching this summer. Most casual crossword apps start fine and get worse — more ads, more coin gates, paywalls that creep up. We're committing not to. Here's what we'll do, in writing, with a date — published before launch so you can hold us to it.
No interstitials between menus. No ads during solving. No ads on app launch. Just one ad before every third puzzle, and that's the cap.
Reveal a letter. Reveal a word. Check your puzzle. All free. All unlimited. There is no in-app currency. There never will be.
Why this matters: coin economies are designed to feel arbitrary so the only sensible response is to buy more coins. Every casual crossword app has one. We refuse on principle.
No "we're moving the Mini behind the paywall" surprises. If our economics ever demand changes, existing free users stay grandfathered. Always.
Concretely: the daily 15×15, the daily Mini, hints, autocheck, and the rolling 30-day archive will remain free until at least April 2029. If we change anything, we'll change it for new users only.
If you buy the Lifetime upgrade, you keep ad-free access and full archive forever. New themes and features ship as free additions for subscribers and lifetime holders. If we ever stop offering lifetime to new customers, existing holders keep theirs.
What this rules out: "we're sunsetting the lifetime tier" emails. Forced upgrades to a new "Pro" plan. Migrations that quietly downgrade your access. None of it.
A real person made the original puzzle you're solving. Their name appears on the start screen and in the archive listing. Syndicated puzzles in the archive carry the credit they ship with — we don't strip bylines.
Why we say this out loud: most casual crossword apps hide constructors entirely. We think that's a small disrespect that compounds. The people who build the thing should get credit for it.
No third-party tracking SDKs beyond crash reporting (Apple-native) and aggregate analytics (counts, not identities). No selling, sharing, or licensing of personal data. Our App Store privacy label stays in the green.
What we don't have: your contacts, your location, your other apps, your demographic profile, your purchase history outside our app. We don't need any of it to make a good crossword.
A promise that lives only in marketing copy is easy to break later. So we put ours on a permanent page with a date, the way a small press might publish its standards.
These promises aren't a new ethic for us. Mighty Mighty Good Games has been making casual iOS games since 2008 — Sudoku, Whirly Word, Word Detective, Kings Solitaire — and we've held ad density and pricing constant on every title we've shipped. Through the rise of subscription gaming, coin economies, live-ops. We just kept shipping with light-touch monetization because that was the original ethic, and we never had a board meeting where someone made us change it. This new app extends that approach to a daily crossword.
If we ever change anything here, the change will be logged publicly. You'll be able to see exactly what changed and when. We'd rather take a small reputation hit for revising a promise than a large one for breaking one quietly.
This page is the receipt.
I'm building this because the casual crossword apps I used to enjoy got worse — more ads, more coin gates, paywalls that crept up over years. When the NYT Mini moved behind the paywall last August, a lot of us lost a daily habit and started looking for a better home. I'm trying to build that home.
It's not a solo project, but the team is small. I'm Darren, owner and developer at Mighty Mighty Good Games — we've been making casual iOS games (Sudoku, Whirly Word, Word Detective, Kings Solitaire) since 2008. We're bootstrapped, which means no VC, no investors, no growth team pushing us toward another coin economy. Just our small team, a roster of indie constructors, and the six promises above. Launching this summer.
No spam, no marketing list resale, no countdown timers. One email when the app is ready, and that's it.