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About

Who builds The Harold, and why

The Harold is built by one person and funded entirely by subscribers, which means it takes no money from advertisers. That last part isn't a detail, it's the reason the product works the way it does.

Alex Littlewood

Founder, and also the person who writes the code, picks the sources, and answers the contact form. Alex is a multi-time entrepreneur who mostly just likes building things. The Harold is a side project, and it exists because he wanted a straightforward way to keep up with the news without wading through everyone's angle on it, couldn't find one that did the job, and figured he would build his own.

Why this exists

The news is exhausting. Every headline is designed to outrage, every feed is packed with ads, and every post demands a reaction. At some point staying informed started costing more than it was worth, and not so much in money as in attention and mood.

The problem isn't really that reporters are lying, it's that almost every outlet is paid by someone other than the person reading it. Advertising, even the fairly innocuous kind, shapes which stories get covered, how they get framed, and how much heat ends up layered on top of them. Matt Taibbi's Hate, Inc. lays out those mechanics better than anything else I've read, and it's a decent part of why The Harold is put together the way it is.

So it's funded the only way that avoids the problem, which is that subscribers pay and nobody else does. There are no ads, no sponsors, no sponsored segments and no affiliate reads. Since there's nothing to sell you except the news itself, there's also no reason to make you angry enough to keep scrolling.

What Harold actually does

Overnight, Harold reads more than 400 sources from across the political spectrum, including wire services, national and local papers, international outlets, tech blogs, financial wires and niche newsletters. Stories get cross-referenced against several sources, and the spin, the clickbait and the outrage framing all come off. What's left is a short audio briefing put together for you specifically, waiting when you wake up. It runs about five minutes and always ends on a good-news story.

The full walkthrough is here →

Under the hood

Harold uses AI to read at a scale no person could manage, not to invent anything. Sourcing and verification run on xAI's Grok and Google's Gemini models in a gather, write and verify loop, where one model pulls the story, another writes it up, and a third checks that write-up back against the original sources before anything ships. The voice is Cartesia's Sonic text-to-speech, SMS goes out through Twilio, and payments run through Stripe.

Nothing gets invented along the way. If something does turn out to be wrong, it's corrected in the next morning's briefing and you're told about it, which is the entire corrections policy. It's kept that short so it can actually be followed.

What we don't do

• No ads or sponsors. Not now and not later, since avoiding them is the reason the product exists in the first place.
• No selling your data. Your email address and phone number are used to deliver your briefing, and nothing else.
• No behavioral tracking. There are no ad pixels and no profile being built out of what you listen to.
• No opinion. Harold reports what happened and leaves you to form your own view.
• No retention games. Canceling takes three clicks from your briefing page, with no phone call, no email and no "are you sure?" screens.