Why

I built Gist because I wanted to know my biological age, I didn't want to pay anyone a subscription for it, and I wanted my health data to stay mine.

I'm an engineer by day. I spend my working hours with thousands of data points, finding the signal in them. Outside of work I lift, run, climb, and hike, and over the years I've built more small projects mixing the two than I can count. At some point it felt strange that I could find the signal in everything except my own body. Gist was the natural next one.

The way most of this stuff works right now is kind of ridiculous if you stop and look at it. Whoop, Oura, Levels, Bevel, and the rest all charge somewhere between $5 and $30 a month, forever, to do roughly the same thing. Pull in the data your watch or ring already collects, run some math on it, and hand you a score. Some of them ship a nice band or ring.

The subscription is for the arithmetic.

None of these companies are evil. They took millions in funding and now they have to figure out how to make 60, 100, 300 dollars per user per year for the rest of time. The data your body produces, your sleep stages, your HRV, your workouts, that's the only thing they have to sell. So everything gets shipped off to a server, modeled, scored, wrapped in a subscription, and pointed back at you.

I'm just one person. There is no investor I need to pay back. There is no growth team I need to feed. I built Gist for myself because I wanted to actually see how my body was doing without signing up for anything or sending my health data to a company I don't know. My goal with it is modest. Make back the $99 a year I pay Apple for the developer account, and get a few more people to care about their sleep and their steps than did before.

Gist runs entirely on your phone. There is no account. There is no server. There is no analytics SDK quietly reporting what you tapped. If you uninstall the app, that is genuinely it, there is no remote copy of your sleep stages sitting in a database I forgot to encrypt.

That's the whole pitch. If you like that idea, the app is here for you.