Show HN: A free minimalist daily habit tracker

Like the design. Personally I think the barrier for a project deserving a domain is pretty low.

"Try for free" is ominous. If you have a paid plan, please have that on the home page. Otherwise, I wouldn't use that wording.

Not sure how much or if this had influence from Guava at all, but I wanted to share the link since we've been around about 3 years and Guava is both free to track and seemingly a superset, except for explicit streak tracking: guavahealth.com

Streak tracking seemed more of a vanity non-health-related aspect so we've left it out so far.

Computing statistical insights based on arbitrary pairings of lifestyle habits is a big feature for many people

Add a thing for bad habits too, and run the streak inverted. The more times you don't click the better.

Unusable on iPhone 13 mini. Couldn’t log in as the OTO entry screen was not visible.

Surprised nobody mentioned the two low resolution images on the front page. (my habits and the email input at the bottom).

Curious why you wouldn't just put the actual component there rather than a fuzzy-screen shot of them?

Neat. I like it!

+1 for not requiring an account to try.

Needs debugging for iPad display sizes and on screen keyboards.

Might be helpful: [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2593139/ipad-web-app-det...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Visual_View...

Nice! Something I’ve been noticing lately is that I’ll see something interesting like this, maybe leave a comment or try it out, and tab away and it’s as good as gone, even if I save it to my Telegram saves, or any other list — there’s just so much time-linear content coming in and past my mind that’s very easy to lose again unless something really grabs my attention and energy for a while, and offers something to look forward to tomorrow. Call it ADD or whatever you want, but there is simply too much content / information, even if it’s all useful and good and non-spammy.

Something along the lines of your app could possibly help “de-linearize” (?) things into a daily timeline or mindspace — I think everyone’s become so used to the timeline conditioning that it can be pretty harmful, really. Not sure what to do with all that.

This is really nicely done. It looks great and is very responsive. I have some things I track that aren’t daily so it doesn’t work for me, but I like that you didn’t build an app with a billion options.

Are you on the free plan for Dexie? How many users do you think you can support with the 100MB limit?

This was cool, looks quite nice and polished.

I also made a quick activity tracker app recently but went with Django, Bootstrap and HTMX. Used it myself for few weeks but then moved on with other stuff. Can't seem to keep up using such app personally.

Cleaned up the readme just now and added a demo video https://codeberg.org/jasalt/tracker. Should be quick to setup with Sqlite locally. I've had it running on Fly.io (free) and connecting to Postgres on a some toy VPS.

Far from a finished thing but maybe can inspire someone.

I wonder how useful other people find streaks as a motivational tool. I'm interested in this, because I feel like I should add this to my own app because other apps do, so I guess some people must find benefit, but personally dislike them.

I can see they provide a great incentive to not miss a day when you've built up a very long streak - years ago, I'd built up well over 1000 day streak on an app, and sure it did motivate me on some of the days when I used the app for a token amount rather than losing the streak.

But then the inverse was true - when I finally missed a day, not because of laziness, but because I had 24 hours of flights and travelling 13 hours forward in timezones (UK to NZ), and crucially no internet access in the middle airport, I lost my streak progress. That was it, back to 0, through no fault of my own. At that point, I thought "Do I really want to use this app for another 3 years to regain my streak? Every day will be a reminder that I lost that streak unfairly..." and I thought about all the minor niggles I had with the app, and just stopped using it entirely after that.

I think maybe there's a better ground, like maybe a 2 day penalty, a week penalty, maybe a month... I'm not sure what would actually work well for motivation while not unfairly penalising accidents. But people travel, people get sick, people have unavoidable family situations. Routine and habits are good, but not more important than real life.

As a humorous note, the screenshot that prompted me to ask this question looks faked! The "Walk Daily" has 71 checks and a longest streak of 53 and a current streak of 34. If he's had a longest streak and then a break, sure the total check count must be at least 87? There's another picture of it with 503 checks, longest streak 450 and a streak of 432. Again, this seems broken and/or fake. I note that this app also has the concept of "streak freeze" that gets automatically applied - so it looks like it just records it rather than it being a penalty. EDIT: Just read via the github that the streak freeze is based on Duolingo's which seems to have a lot of discussion around it, and which also seems to be doing a bunch of weird things with freezes, but the key point is that you buy or earn them in advance and they get consumed as you miss a day.

On a side note, The only habit tracker that has worked me is BEEMINDER.

Quick bug.

As an unauthed user, add a habit. Then log in. Habit has disappeared. (but can create habits, which then sync just fine to other devices)

I guess I was expecting my unauthed user habit to persist after logging in.

Would love to see the code, any plans on open sourcing?

You can use 16px font size on mobile so the browser won't zoom in to the text field.

As someone with ADHD “streak freezes” are a thing I never knew I needed, wow. I’ve tried so many gamified habit things and the anxiety over potentially missed dopamine is just so present no matter how old or “wise” I become.

Excited to try this out

Had to create an account to say this is a good free app.

What's your plan to keep it up and running? Key concern from non-technical people such as myself is longevity of new apps like this.

Is the assumption that you do these things once a day? Any way to edit the frequency? I'd like to do things every other day, once a week, once a month, etc.

Hi, wow I love the notion minimal style design. Where is the data saved? Are there any limitations in use? Congratulations on the habit tracker you created.

Nice. I see the GitHub style tracker alot lately

Nice and clean. I would love a collapsed view of the habits. How does the offline mode works? Any monetization plans?

Trying to add a check in the past but the calendar shows up but can't select a date. Using chrome.

Great idea!

Doesn’t work well on mobile safari

This is perfect, I've been wanting something like this forever.

Those are features I’ve always been looking for in a tracker

Edit: issues on ios should be fixed now

Are you planning to launch an app?

I use an iPhone 12 mini. In portrait mode, the site was nearly unusable. I would add a habit, and the keyboard covered up the description field. There was no way for me to scroll the page to get the description field. Fortunately, the iOS keyboard has a next field button which I could click and hello me to entered the habit description.

I too like the clean design and wish you good luck.

This seems quite broken on iPhone (iPhone 12, iOS 17, Safari browser). Trying to add a task ends up blowing the model up too big and it’s impossible to scroll to or even see the button to add the task.

this screams pwa!

I just want to put out Loop Habit Tracker ( https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits ). Its open source, ad free and has the option to start the day at 3 am. I am very happy with this solution.

Nice work on this habit tracker! Love the clean design and the GitHub-like year widget. It's awesome that it works without registration!

I am also building a habit tracker ( https://mygoodweek.com ). Similar story, none of the existing options were satisfactory~ It tracks habits automatically from Google Calendar events and lets you check habits manually too. It would be cool to get your thoughts!

I'm always up late and I'd like to get a last minute habit checked off before I go to bed, but so many tools move to the next day at midnight. I ended up building my own minimal chore tracker[1] because I couldn't find any that aligned to that schedule. I really think everyone has slightly different needs and chore/habit trackers make a great minimal programming+design project.

[1] https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/

Looks good. How do you "done" past days? Sometimes I don't actually miss the habit but not have the time to open screen.

I also created similar habit tracker app for mobile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yedev.habi... The unique thing is that I use google drive to sync habits

This is really cool.

I don’t think I have diagnosable ADHD, but I have noticed that gamification features like “streaks” often cause more problems in building habits than helping them. My daughter, who is diagnosed with severe ADHD, eventually had to “give up” some of the streak based apps like Duolingo because they are, imho, preying on our desire to complete “streaks” only to increase in-app activity for their own platform.

I’ve been really loving Llamalife - https://llamalife.co - they don’t do habits but they organize a lot of the schema around people who get overwhelmed easily.

Thank you for sharing - especially with the green flag of "no account required"!

I wanted to go habit tracing in a minimalist way, and ended up using checkboxes in Obsidian daily notes (and take them anyway, previously in Evernote) and plugins (there are a few, I use a combination of https://github.com/pyrochlore/obsidian-tracker and https://github.com/hedonihilist/obsidian-habit-calendar).

I've been working on a minimalist daily habit tracker that I designed for counting calories as part of my own weight loss journey. It's called Quick Calories. The PWA is free, it doesn't require an account, has no advertising, and works offline.

Link: [https://calories.joeldare.com]

love the UI.

I made habit tracker visualizer based on Apple Reminders

https://public.me/anton/daily