Vesper voice calls end at five minutes. There's no extension button, no “keep talking?” modal. When the timer hits zero, the call closes and the two of you are dropped back into the app. People sometimes ask if that feels abrupt. Almost nobody finds out, because almost nobody reaches the timer.
Why a hard cap
Open-ended calls have a problem: they don't end well. The first person to suggest ending the call feels like the one who's bored. So both people stay on a few minutes past the point where the conversation was good. The lasting memory of the call becomes those last few flat minutes — not the good ones in the middle.
A timer fixes this by removing the question. Nobody has to be the one who hangs up. The call ends because that's how the app works.
Why five
Long enough to actually exchange something — a real story, a real laugh, a real complaint. Short enough that a bad pairing has a built-in exit two minutes from now, not twenty. We tried three, seven, and ten. Five was the one where both sides reported feeling that they'd had a real conversation and neither felt trapped.
What people do at four minutes
They speed up. They land the story. Sometimes they exchange a handle so they can DM after. The cap creates urgency in the way that a closing-time bar does — the last call is often the best one.