Why Offerfy is free, and who we expect to pay instead
We build for candidates first, earn the right to their profile second, and sign employers third. Here is why that order matters, and why we will not reverse it.
Most job products are built in the wrong order
They sign the employers first, then go looking for candidates to fill the inventory. Which makes you the side being counted: your resume becomes someone else's product, and what you get back is a score, a stream of notifications, and some exposure you never agreed to.
Offerfy is deliberately built the other way round. Make the candidate side genuinely good first. Good enough that people choose to hand us their profile. Only then do we take that trust to employers and sign the contracts that cover what this costs to run.
That order is the whole bet. It is also the one thing we will not move.
We serve one kind of person right now
Highly competitive technical applicants.
That is a line, not a compliment. We mean people who already have options: engineers who can get the interviews, who know what they want, and who will actually sit down and rewrite a resume for a role worth having.
For that person, most of the tools on the market are broken. They assume you need teaching. They hand you a score — "your resume is a 72" — and then pour your words into a template you cannot change. You do not need to be taught. You need a tool that gets out of the way.
So we took the narrow path: serve that group, rather than everyone who is looking for work.
What that line forces us to build
Nearly every product decision falls out of it.
The resume is source code, not a form. You edit Typst directly. No wizard. Someone who resents templates wants control.
The ATS check only claims parseability. We tell you whether a machine can read the PDF you are about to attach. We do not grade your chances — that number is fiction, and this audience spots it instantly.
The job catalog is built by throwing things out. It comes from employers' own recruiting systems, and we discard most of it on purpose. Finance Manager goes. So does Technical Recruiter — that is a recruiting job, not an engineering one. What is left is the roles this group would genuinely rewrite a resume for.
We went after the tier that is hardest to reach. Semiconductors and infrastructure — NVIDIA, Micron, Applied Materials, Intel — do not show up on the usual startup job platforms. Getting them meant building something separate, so we built it.
Who pays, and when
The candidate side is free, and not as a promotion.
Editing, previewing, exporting the PDF, ATS checks, and browsing jobs are unmetered at every tier, because none of them cost us anything per use. AI editing has a weekly allowance, because it is the only part that genuinely bills us — and we would rather publish an honest ceiling than put up a card form.
The one thing we could ever be paid for is introducing someone who chose to be introduced to an employer. "Open to matching" is off by default, the product works fully without it, and you can switch it off whenever you like.
Which means covering our costs depends on first building something people think is worth handing their profile to. That has not happened yet. Until it does, this side of the ledger is ours to carry.
Why we will not flip the order
This road has been walked before, and it ends in the same place every time: grow on being good to candidates, then break that product to monetise it, and end up holding a database that is large and worth nothing.
The hard part was never finding people willing to sign up. It is finding people who can afford to be choosy about work — and those are the first to leave a product that starts getting worse for them.
So there are things we will not do. We will not put the editor behind a paywall. We will not sell the profile of anyone who did not agree to it. And we will not let "open to matching" become the only way to get real use out of this.
Where it actually stands
Resume editing, chat that edits that same file, tailored versions aimed at a single role, and the public job catalog all work today, and you can start without an account.
Matching and applying for you do not. You pick the role yourself, and applying means finishing on the original posting. We have not got there, and we are not going to pretend otherwise until we have.
This is not a roadmap. It is a commitment about sequence: get your side right first.