This one isn't even my idea.
A while ago I read a post by a guy who'd tracked his whole life in Excel for years. Life areas across the columns — health, work, money, relationships — one row per day. Each cell coloured green if he made progress, white if nothing happened, red if something went wrong. Once a week he rolled it up into a weekly sheet, once a month into a monthly one. His point stuck with me: just seeing it honestly made it harder to lie to himself, and that quietly pushed him to act.
I'd bounced off every habit app I tried — usually the moment a streak broke and the whole thing felt like failure. This was the opposite: no game, just an honest mirror. So I asked the author if I could build it as a real product. He said go ahead. That became Ovanri.
What it is
One tap a day, per life area: progress, setback, or neutral. Takes about ten seconds. It rolls up into honest weekly and monthly snapshots — no scores to chase, no streaks to break, no badges, no leaderboards, no social feed. The whole idea is closer to kaizen (small steps that compound) and wabi-sabi (a setback is just data, not a verdict) than to a dopamine loop.
Stack, for the curious: Next.js + Node/Express + MongoDB, Firebase auth, Paddle for billing, privacy-friendly cookieless analytics. Core is free forever; a paid tier adds unlimited areas and daily reflections.
What I learned
Cutting the streak counter was the hardest call. I actually built one first — a "current streak" number on the dashboard. It felt engaging. Then I realised it fought the entire product: a streak punishes a missed day and stacks shame on the people who already want to keep going. Anyone who'd quit over a broken streak wasn't really the user anyway. I replaced it with "active days," which just counts days with progress and never resets.
The honest-signal idea has a sharp edge. Someone pointed out that the same honest data can land completely differently for two people — for one it's calm awareness, for another it becomes "I'm failing at everything." The mirror isn't automatically kind. So the real job isn't just showing data; it's shaping the relationship people have with it (neutral language, weekly patterns over daily judgement, nothing to "lose"). That's the part I'm most curious to watch in real use.
Paddle as Merchant of Record was basically my only sane billing option as a non-US founder. Worth knowing if you're in a similar spot.
It's the first version, rough edges and all — ovanri.com if you want to poke at it. Honest feedback welcome; I clearly built it for people who think the way I do, and there might not be that many of us.