I never set out to build a habit tracker. I set out to track my own habits and discovered that every app I tried was wrong about what I had actually done.
I'm a cybersecurity professional. I have an MSc, a Lead Auditor certification, and a portfolio of work I'm proud of. I'm also looking for the right role in security in the UK. Until that role lands, I sort mail at Royal Mail to pay the bills, I volunteer as a Security Specialist at Kaine Management because I'd rather be doing the work than waiting around for it, and I build software in the gaps. GridHabits is one of those things I built in the gaps.
The reason I built it is simple, and the reason will probably be familiar to you.
Five things every habit tracker got wrong
I was trying to hold five things at once. Job applications. Cybersecurity certifications. Gym. Reading. A couple of other small habits I won't bore you with. Five lanes, every day, one person, no team, no excuse to drop any of them.
I downloaded a habit tracker. I won't name it; it doesn't matter which one because they all did the same thing.
The first problem was that I'd do the thing and forget to tap the app. I'd go to the gym at six in the evening, come home, eat, work on a cover letter, go to sleep. The next morning I'd open the app and the streak would be at zero. Not because I'd missed the gym. Because I'd missed opening the app. The app was treating my forgetfulness about the app as a failure of the habit. It was lying about my effort.
The second problem was midnight. I'd finish reading at twenty past midnight. Open the app to log it. The app would say I'd missed yesterday. Technically true. Practically absurd. A clock had moved while I was reading. The app didn't care that I'd been reading for forty-five minutes, only that I'd finished forty-five minutes after some line drawn by a server somewhere.
The third problem was that the app gave me feelings instead of facts. "Great job!" "Keep it up!" "You're on fire!" I didn't want a pep talk. I wanted to know exactly how many days out of the last ninety I'd actually gone to the gym. I wanted the math. I wanted the proof. Habit trackers, weirdly, were the apps least willing to show me my actual data.
The fourth problem was that the streak was the entire story. I'd do the thing for twelve days. Miss one day, sometimes because a Royal Mail shift had eaten the time I usually went to the gym. The streak went back to zero. The previous twelve days vanished, narratively. The app's interface said "Streak: 0" and that was the headline. Twelve real days of effort, reduced to zero by the visual hierarchy.
The fifth problem was that everything looked sad. Habit trackers look like productivity apps from 2014. Flat, beige, anxious. I wanted to open the thing every day. If you want me to open something every day, it should at least be designed for someone who's an adult and has eyes.
I tried to fix it by being more disciplined about the app. Tap immediately after the gym. Set a reminder. Don't read past midnight. After about three weeks of this I realised I was now tracking my discipline at using the habit tracker, which was a habit on top of a habit, and the original purpose was lost.
I deleted it.
What I actually wanted
I wanted a record that told the truth about what I'd done. Not the truth according to the clock the app was using. The truth I knew, in my own head, about whether I'd actually gone to the gym that day. If I'd done it, the app should be on my side about it. If I missed a day, the app should record that I missed it, honestly, without erasing the fifty days before it.
I wanted the streak to still be there, because the streak is what gets you up in the morning. The pull of not breaking a number is real. I am not against streaks. I am against the streak being the only thing the app remembers.
I wanted statistics. Real numbers. Days completed in the last month, the last three months. Days missed. The actual pattern of my life, visible.
I wanted it to look like something I'd built for myself, not something a venture-funded growth team had a meeting about.
And I wanted to be able to fix the small mistakes that aren't really mistakes. The "I went to the gym yesterday and forgot to tap" mistake. The "I finished reading at twelve-twenty and the app didn't count it" mistake. Not so I could cheat. So the record could match reality.
A note about why this app costs what it does
I'm going to be honest about something most app makers won't say out loud.
I'm from a middle-class family in India. I came to the UK to study Cybersecurity at Sheffield Hallam. Studying abroad was a dream I worked for, and I'm still paying for it. I'm in student debt. That's not a sob story; it's a fact that shapes how I think about software.
I make habit trackers and phishing detection tools and CV tools in the gaps between Royal Mail shifts. I do this because I believe if you build something that gives real value to a person, that person will pay for it. Not a subscription that drains them quietly forever. A fair price for something honestly made.
So GridHabits has a lifetime plan. You pay once, you own it. No recurring guilt charge on your card. If enough people find this app useful enough to buy the lifetime plan, I can pay down what I owe and keep building things. That's the actual exchange. I think it's a fair one.
I'm not asking for charity. I'm telling you what I'm building this on so you understand what kind of person is behind the app. There's no funded team. There's no venture investor I'm trying to please. There's me, the person who built it, and you, the person deciding whether it's worth your money. The transaction is direct. I'd rather have it be honest.
How I work
There's something about my day job that affected how I built this. In cybersecurity, you spend a lot of time looking at logs. Sign-in logs, alert logs, audit trails. You're looking for patterns. You're also looking for things that are pretending. An app that nudges a user every two hours and dresses it up as "helping you build a habit" looks, to me, structurally similar to a phishing email that dresses up a request for credentials as a security alert. Both of them are using the same vocabulary, care, urgency, partnership, to get behaviour out of you that benefits the platform, not you.
I don't think the people who build the big habit-tracker apps wake up wanting to manipulate users. I think they have a metric called "DAU" and the things that lift DAU are notifications, streak anxiety, and engagement loops. The metric becomes the brief. Nobody had to be a villain. The thing just drifted in a direction where the user's stress is fuel for the app.
I don't have a DAU metric. I have one user I'm building for, and that user, for now, is mostly me. So GridHabits is built on a different idea: the app is honest about what you did, energetic about what's ahead, and shuts up when there's nothing to say.
What GridHabits actually is
A habit is a grid. Each day is one square. You tap the square the day you do the thing.
Streaks are real and they're respected. They go up when you show up. They reset when you miss. That part is the same as every other habit tracker. The streak is the engine that drives you forward, I will defend that. Nothing wakes you up at six AM like a number you don't want to break.
The grid is the difference. The grid is permanent. Every square you've ever filled stays right there. Miss a day and the streak resets, the streak is built to be lost and earned back, but the fifty-seven squares behind it don't move. The grid is the honest story. The streak is the engine. Both have their job.
If you forgot to tap yesterday after you actually went to the gym, you can fix it. Past-day recovery within a seven-day window. Not because cheating is fine, but because reality is the point. Outside the window, missed is missed. Inside it, life is allowed to be life.
The statistics page tells you the truth. Days completed this month. This year. The pattern. The math. No emoji.
The whole thing is dark, focused, designed like an adult tool. Black, orange, IBM Plex Mono, the kind of typography I'd want on my own laptop. Nothing flashes. Nothing buzzes at you. The app is calm when you don't need it, and right there when you do.
What this app won't do
It will never punish you for a streak you broke.
It will never count a late session as a missed day if you can tell the truth about when you actually finished.
It will never collect data it doesn't need. I run my own backend. I see the bare minimum. I'm a cybersecurity professional; this is something I have opinions about.
It will never charge you forever. There's a lifetime plan. You buy it once, you own it, and I don't see you again unless you want to see me.
It will never compete with your phone for your attention. The notifications are inexact, infrequent, and you can turn them off without breaking anything.
Why I'm telling you all this
You're reading the founder telling you about his app. Most founder stories are written to make you feel something so you install the thing. I'd rather you install it because you actually need it and trust who built it.
I'm one person, in Leicester, building this between shifts. I shipped two other apps this year, ThreatVerdict, for phishing detection, and CV Tailor, a Chrome extension that helps people tailor CVs. Both shipped. Both have real users. GridHabits is the third.
What I'm trying to do is small and honest. I want to build software that treats the user like the adult they are. I want to make enough from this for the work to be sustainable, not VC-scale, sustainable. Sustainable means the debt comes down, the rent gets paid, and I can keep building.
You can install GridHabits on the App Store now. Android is coming. The website is gridhabits.com. The maker is me. If you've ever quit a habit tracker because the app was wrong about your effort, this one is for you.