“Circuit breaker for texting your ex. Three failed ‘u up’s trip the breaker and further sends fail fast, rerouting dopamine to a mid TikTok. HALF_OPEN after 30 minutes admits one canary text. If it 200s, we CLOSE. If it 504s, back to OPEN — this time for 24 hours, doubled next round.”
The Problem
You are the client. Your ex is a flaky microservice with a p99 of never. Every “hey” blocks a thread of your central nervous system until it times out four days later against your bedroom ceiling at 2am. Without a breaker, one bad night takes down your entire personality.
POST /ex/message · error rate: 71% · p99: heat-death
PAYLOADLATENCYSTATUSRETRY
hey3.2s200 OK—
u up8h429yes
saw this and thought of u3d504yes
sorry ignore that45m301no
how have u been9dtimeoutyes
wait i had a dream about u—no routeyes
please delete that6s418 teapotno
circuit_state: CLOSED (should be OPEN)errors_in_window: 5 / 7
The Solution
Wrap every outbound message in a breaker. Three consecutive failures trip the state to OPEN. All subsequent sends fail instantly with a polite “are you sure?”. After a cooldown, one canary is allowed through. Success closes the circuit. Failure reopens it, doubled.
breaker state · finite automaton for the heart
state
CLOSED
messages flow · you are still delusional
state
HALF_OPEN
one canary text · your friends are worried
state
OPEN
fail fast · dopamine reroutes to tiktok
CLOSED──3 timeouts / 5min──▶OPEN
OPEN──cooldown 30min──▶HALF_OPEN
HALF_OPEN──canary → 200──▶CLOSED
HALF_OPEN──canary → 504──▶OPEN × 2
A Week On The Breaker
Outbound throughput before and after install. Note the drop at 2:14am Wednesday, when the breaker OPENED and you, for the first time in recorded history, went to bed.
msgs / day · unmediated vs breaker-73% MTTR on self-esteem
unmediatedwith breakerWed 2:14am: breaker OPENS · user goes to bed
Pricing
free
You retry forever. Your friends form a private group chat about you. Currently: 4.2M users in production.
$5 / mo
One big red 'thoughts & prayers' button. You trip it yourself after each mistake. You will not.
$29 / mo
Sliding-window failure detection. Trips automatically, sends a soft 'let's not' to your notification tray, reroutes to a walk.
custom
Sidecar deployed against every emotionally unavailable contact. Envoy for the soul. Includes 24/7 mTLS with your therapist.
TAM
addressable market · humans currently retrying
1.1B smartphones × avg 3.4 exes / user × $0.11 dignity saved / trip
= $411B of thundering herd averted
Methodology: our CTO’s phone at 1:47am on a random Saturday.
The Ask
$6M seed. Funds the classifier that tells a real check-in from a relapse (hard), the sliding-window telemetry, and the SMS egress bill for the polite bounce message, which turns out to be the main cost center. Series A pitch: “We’re Hystrix, but for the group chat where you workshop the text.”