You don't need a Letterboxd account to get film recommendations from your taste. Intertitle reads your ratings — and you can create those inside the app. Rate a handful of films you have strong feelings about, and Intertitle's engine warms up the same way it would from an imported Letterboxd history, then programmes a short, taste-ranked shortlist for tonight. Letterboxd is a convenient on-ramp if you already have one — not a prerequisite.
The Short Version
- Letterboxd is optional. Intertitle lets you log and rate films natively in the app. Your taste profile builds from those ratings — no import required.
- A handful of ratings is enough to start. High ratings pull your profile toward what you love; low ratings push it away. The more you rate, the sharper it gets.
- You get a programme for tonight, not an endless queue: a short, taste-ranked shortlist led by your strongest match.
- It's free, on iOS and the web app.
You Don't Need Letterboxd to Get Recommendations
A lot of taste-based recommenders assume you arrive with a Letterboxd export in hand. Intertitle doesn't. Logging and rating films happens directly in Intertitle — an in-app diary and rating system that feeds the recommendation engine exactly like imported history would. Whether a rating came from a Letterboxd import or a tap inside the app, the engine treats it the same: as a signal about your taste.
So if you've never used Letterboxd — or you have, but don't want to bother exporting — you can still get going. You rate a few films in the app, and Intertitle starts recommending from your taste, not a popularity chart.
How to Start Without a Letterboxd Account
- Get Intertitle. It's free on the App Store for iOS.
- Create a free account.
- Rate a handful of films you have opinions about. Search for films you love and a few you didn't, and rate them in the app. Strong opinions in both directions are useful — a film you rated one star is a useful signal too: it tells the engine what to steer away from, just as your favorites tell it what to steer toward.
- Open the Tonight screen. Intertitle builds your taste profile from those ratings and programmes a shortlist immediately.
You don't need a long history to begin. A handful of rated films gives the engine a real starting point, and the profile keeps sharpening every time you log something new.
What You Get: A Programme for Tonight
Open the Tonight screen and Intertitle shows a short, taste-ranked programme — one film headlined as your strongest match, followed by a handful of alternatives in an "Also on the bill" grid. The screen labels it "Programmed from your taste." It's a short list by design, not a 200-item queue you have to scroll.
You can narrow it further: mood chips and a freeform mood field let you set the register you're in tonight, and there's an "Under 100 minutes" runtime filter for when you want something you can actually finish. Or open Reely, Intertitle's conversational film companion, and just ask — "something great under 100 minutes," or "surprise me with something I haven't seen." Reely is backed by Claude and uses your watch history and the film catalog to answer in plain language. (It's free within a daily message cap.)
How the Engine Works — With or Without Letterboxd
The source of your ratings doesn't change how Intertitle ranks films. From whatever you've rated, it builds a taste embedding — a vector representation of your preferences in a high-dimensional space. Films that share the qualities you rate highly land geometrically close to your profile; films that don't land far away. Your ratings weight the profile directly, and recency decay means what you've been watching lately counts for more than what you logged long ago.
The primary signal is embedding-based cosine proximity to your taste profile, blended with quality and diversity signals so the programme doesn't collapse into a narrowing echo chamber. For the full picture of how this captures texture and tone that genre tags miss, see How Embedding-Based Recommendations Read Your Film Taste.
The one honest caveat: more ratings make a sharper profile. Starting from a handful of in-app ratings works and gives you a real programme — it simply gets better the more you log.
If You Do Have Letterboxd, It's a Head Start
None of this means Letterboxd is useless to Intertitle — quite the opposite. If you already keep a Letterboxd diary, importing it is the fastest way to a rich taste profile: upload your export ZIP (or individual CSVs) once, and you can connect your Letterboxd handle so Intertitle pulls in new diary entries automatically every few hours, with no re-export. For the step-by-step, see How to Get Movie Recommendations From Your Letterboxd.
But that's a convenience for people who already have the history — not a gate. Native in-app rating gets newcomers to the same place.
Is It Really Free?
Yes. The Tonight programme, Reely (within its daily message cap), in-app logging and ratings, your diary and watchlist, the taste map, stats, and "More like this" are all free today. A Pro tier with deeper analytics is planned, but there's no purchase flow yet — so everything you'd actually use to get recommendations without Letterboxd is available at no cost.