From a simple idea…
“Why is it so hard to tell your MP what you think?”
The Spark
People care. That was never the problem.
But between caring and acting sat twenty small steps.
Who represents me? How do I reach them? What do I even say?
Every step lost people.
Almost every letter died unwritten.
OpenLetter is that path.
OpenLetter: civic engagement, live at openletter.com.au
Open the live siteCivic tech optimises institutions. Nobody optimises the citizen.
The landscape today
Government portals
Only list contact details, the writing is on you.
Petition platforms
Collect signatures that are easy to ignore.
Advocacy tools
Serve organisations, not individual citizens.
The gap
Nothing helps one person write one letter that gets read.
The core experience principles.
The commitments that held from first sketch to production, each one a response to something the product had to live with.
Two minutes, including the hard part
A representative-lookup engine maps any address to the right electorate and inbox, so the research that stops most letters simply never reaches the user.
Help with the words, without replacing them
Language models suggest structure and phrasing while the letter stays the writer's own, personal letters get read; generated form letters get filtered.
Free forever has to mean cheap to run
A lean Next.js and PostgreSQL stack on managed infrastructure keeps the cost per letter near zero, so free stays sustainable rather than subsidised.
Built on a modern, scalable technology stack.
Next.js
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
GitHub
OpenAI
Render
The pace was unlike anything we'd seen from an agency, strategy on Monday, something we could click by Friday.
