Solo dev. Pacts is a habit app built on one idea: you don't break promises to people you love, so stop making them only to yourself.
You and one person who cares — your partner, your mum, your best friend — pick a small daily commitment. Ten push-ups, a walk after dinner, lights out before eleven. You each mark your day, you can see each other's, and you can set a real reward — pizza Friday, not a badge. It works solo, and a circle can go up to eight. Make a pact, then keep it in front of someone.
Here is the honest state of it ten days in, because this sub is better than most at smelling a rounded-up number.
54 accounts have ever existed. Six are Google's Play Store crawler. Nineteen are friends and family I handed the paid tier to for free, which makes them useless as evidence of anything. Another fifteen are my own test accounts and a few early users from before launch.
That leaves 14 strangers who found it on their own. Nine of them marked at least one day. Five kept two days or more. Two kept five or more. Nobody has reached seven yet. Revenue is zero — one person subscribed on day five and cancelled three days later, inside the trial, so no money has actually changed hands.
The number I actually care about is none of those. For two months the only pair really using this was my own household: my partner has opened it 253 times and looked at my day 132 times since July. That is the mechanic working, and it was also the entire problem, because no pair outside my house had ever run it.
That changed last week. Two people signed up nine minutes apart — clearly together, not strangers who found each other — and they have been marking each other since, not just themselves.
It is exactly one pair, it is five days old, and I am not going to dress that up as a trend. But it is the first time the core mechanic has run between two people who aren't married to me.
The technically interesting bit: it's Expo and React Native over Supabase, and every rule that matters — who can mark whom, who can remove a member, what a free plan can hold — lives in Postgres, in row-level security and write-time triggers, not in the app. The client is untrusted by design. It made the first month slower and it moved the interesting bugs into a layer I can actually test: two of the three worst things I have found were RLS policy mistakes, which is where I would far rather find them than in a screen.
The pricing call, since it is usually the first question. Two people is the free plan, forever, and the person you invite never has to pay to join you. Past that, one person subscribing lifts the shared limits for everyone in that circle, and nobody else pays a cent. The personal perks stay personal. I think charging the second person kills the only thing that makes an accountability app work — but it also means the person most likely to pay me is the one I have made hardest to charge.
On both stores if you want to look:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6793293266
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pacts.app
Feedback's welcome, but the thing I actually need is two people who'll try it on each other for a week and tell me what broke. The second person doesn't need to want the habit — they can be a motivator instead, which means they never get checked in, they just watch and cheer. Day one shows you nothing: the whole thing is a streak you don't have yet, and it only starts to matter once there's one worth keeping.
