Conversations started on Unfate's free plan expire after a window of inactivity, and it's one of the more complained-about design choices in the app. We're not going to pretend it's purely a feature — it's partly a business constraint, and we'd rather say that outright than dress it up as "encouraging meaningful connection" or some other euphemism.
The honest version: hosting active conversations indefinitely, for every match anyone has ever made, is a real and growing cost, and expiry keeps that manageable without forcing every feature behind a paywall on day one. It also has a genuine secondary benefit — dead conversations that nobody was ever going to return to stop cluttering the inbox, which several members have told us they actually prefer once it's explained.
We know it costs some people a conversation they meant to get back to. That's a real downside, not a hidden upside. If it changes — longer windows, an option to extend — it'll be because the constraint changed, and we'll say that plainly too, the same way we're saying this.