Why I made Dusknote

Why do apps want to charge me for my own data?

A few months ago I switched to a new phone, and the notes app where I tracked my migraines did not back up properly. Two years of data I'd kept to discuss with my neurologist, gone. I was annoyed. I was frustrated. I was bummed. I went looking for a dedicated health tracking app (and there are many, even migraine-specific ones). But most of them hide your history behind a subscription (30 days of history are free, but see the rest with a paid account), or call exporting a file a "premium feature." It can feel like renting access to your own medical history, which you did the work to collect. I wanted something more customizable, where I owned my own data and it would all be in a format I could actually read and use.

Meet Dusknote, a health condition tracker

Dusknote is a health tracker for anything you want to keep notes on, where you own your data (and plain language backups!), you can customize how things are described, and you can share and print reports whenever you want. It's free forever with access to all of its features, with no upsells and no ads.

Here are some of the important product decisions that define it:

It's local-device first, but has real, readable backups. Cloud backups (particularly iCloud) can be difficult to verify or even read, so I wanted this to be easy to track, easy to verify, and easy to bring your data anywhere. Dusknote backs up to a readable Google Spreadsheet for a live backup, and also auto-generates a monthly "all history" backup PDF, saved to your Drive, just in case. There are several safeguards in place to ensure your data doesn't go missing.

You own your data entirely. There is no server, no account, no company in the middle that could decide to start charging you later. You can't get locked out of your data (I mean, unless you get locked out of your Google Account, in which case, you have bigger problems).

Shareable reports. You choose what goes in it, and it prints or exports as a PDF from your phone easily.

Easy to personalize. I track migraines, but you might be tracking an entirely different kind of condition. It's easy to customize within the app with your own vocabulary, your own ratings, your own symptoms and treatments.

Calm design for un-calm moments. The app features dark mode schemes, muted green colors, and a big button to log on the main screen. This means that a 3am episode has an easy-to-find button, with a screen that is not glaring at you.

Free and open source, under your own accounts. There's no where structurally to put a paywall. The app lives in your own accounts, and checks the main repo to tell you when there is a security or feature update.

Plain language guides to build it yourself manually, or with AI-assistance. I wanted this to be a tool that anyone could build, that made data ownership easy. I've built a setup guide that can be followed manually step-by-step, as well as instructions for an AI assistant to help you troubleshoot while you build. All of the project's documentation is written in plain language.

Want to try it? Play around with the demo. Want your own? dusknote.app has the setup guide. And if you want the longer story, the decisions behind it and what building it with Claude was like, that's on my site.

Thanks all, I hope this is useful for you or someone you know, and let me know what you think.