one parent · one teen · one fire
One question a day, between you two.
Answers burn after reading.
free · no account · 10 seconds a day
App Store & Google Play: coming soon. Today, Fogo installs straight from your browser.
the loop
How it works
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01
The question drops
At your hour — 19:00 if you like. One gentle notification: the question itself, never “time to connect! 🌈”.
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02
Both answer privately
Ten seconds: a line, a word, an emoji. Neither sees anything of the other — not even whether they’ve answered.
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03
Reveal — only when both answered
No answer, no peek. The parent has to open up too; nobody gets to just interrogate.
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04
React — positive only
One reaction each (❤️ 🫶 💪 👀 😂 🔥). The palette can reward courage; it can never mock it.
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05
Then it burns
Seen by both — gone forever. No archive, no receipts. What stays is the fire: it grows warmer the more you talk, dims if you drift, and never dies.
teen power
The teen holds the matches
Every app teens actually love makes them the judge, never the examinee. Fogo is built that way.
Swap, invisibly
Don’t like today’s question? Swap it. The parent sees only the new one — never that you swapped.
You-pick days
Every few days, you choose the question the parent gets. Your turn to grill them.
The Grill
Swipe through a deck of spicy questions and put one straight to the parent — “worst trouble you ever got into at school?”
Jokers & the 🐔 counter
Anyone can dodge a grill by playing a Joker — but chickens are counted, on both sides. You hold three a week; the parent holds one.
Skipping is invisible
Skip a daily question and it’s simply gone — not counted, not listed, not shown to anyone. Ever.
No reports, ever
No history, no dashboard, no record a parent could review later. There is nothing to check up on.
privacy by physics
We can’t read it — and it’s deleted anyway
Not a policy — an architecture. The promises below hold because the system is physically incapable of breaking them.
The key never touches our servers
End-to-end encrypted: your pair’s key travels inside the invite link, device to device. Our server relays ciphertext it cannot open.
Burned after reading
Once you’ve both seen the reveal, the answers are permanently deleted. No archive exists, anywhere.
72-hour backstop
Answered or not, read or not: everything is wiped 72 hours after the question dropped. No exceptions.
No accounts
No email, no phone number, no sign-up — a nickname and an emoji. There is nothing about you to keep.
Free — no ads, never data
The daily loop is free forever, publicly promised. For an app whose brand is “we can’t read your answers”, selling data isn’t a temptation — it’s impossible.
standing on shoulders
What we read and loved
Fogo isn’t invented from scratch — it borrows shamelessly from people who spent their lives studying how humans get close. Here’s who, and what each one taught the app.
Arthur Aron
The 36 Questions (1997) · Sprecher et al. (2013)
Closeness grows through reciprocal self-disclosure that deepens slowly — and taking turns beats interviewing.
Fogo took: the both-answer gate, and questions that start silly and earn their depth over weeks.
Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté
Hold On to Your Kids
Connection precedes influence. The deepest way to stay close to a teen is for them to feel known — and still liked.
Fogo took: a hard product law — Fogo never helps a parent get anything from a teen except today’s answer.
John Gottman · Roy Lewicki
Repair research · apology science (2016)
What predicts a relationship isn’t avoiding ruptures — it’s whether repair is received; owning your part matters most.
Fogo took: the Repair question pack — “after a rough one” — which either side, including the teen, can invoke.
Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
Validate before you advise — and hard topics go better when they enter sideways, through a third thing.
Fogo took: hot takes and hypotheticals as the side door for real subjects.
Dan Siegel
Brainstorm — the ESSENCE of adolescence
The teenage brain’s emotional spark, social engagement, novelty-seeking and creativity are features, not malfunctions.
Fogo took: a voice that celebrates the teen brain — and puts the parent’s own teenage years on the table.
Search Institute
Developmental Relationships framework
Relationships that shape young people share five elements — and one of them is genuinely sharing power.
Fogo took: swap, you-pick days, and the Grill — real power in the teen’s hands, not decoration.
Heart IQ — Christian Pankhurst
Witnessing · celebration · amplification
Being seen without needing to perform; celebration as a discipline; whatever you give attention to grows. A core inspiration for how Fogo treats the moment after someone opens up.
Fogo took: the reveal as a witnessing moment, joy-weighted questions, and the burn as closure — met, then released.
Marshall Duke & Robyn Fivush
Family narrative research
Kids who know their family’s stories — including the messy ones — turn out more resilient.
Fogo took: “Back in your day” as a first-class question category, not filler.
four languages
Speaks your language
Every question is written natively in all four — never machine-translated. And each of you reads in your own language: bilingual families, this was built for you.