Show HN: I built a simple meditation app because I was tired of subscriptions

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Show HN: I built a simple meditation app because I was tired of subscriptions (apps.apple.com)

1 points by PureMeditate 108 days ago

The Backstory: I'm a software engineer with anxiety, and I meditate regularly to manage it. I’ve been using Calm, but their price keeps going up. And they also require accounts and collect usage data, which I’m not a fan of as a privacy-focused developer.

The Why: I wanted something simple, private, subscription-free with a nice looking interface but couldn’t find one that matched exactly what I wanted. So as a side project, I built one for myself and my wife called Pure Meditate.

She ended up showing it to a few friends, and the ones who tried it via TestFlight really liked it. Especially the no subscription part. I figured there were probably others who would too. So, today I'm showing it off for the first time.

I'm curious to hear feedback from the HN community. Please don't be too brutal :)

1 comments

ConvertlyAI 108 days ago

Congrats on shipping this. The subscription fatigue in the market right now is very real. It's exactly why I went with a hybrid pay-as-you-go credit model for my own SaaS instead of forcing a monthly sub on day one just to process an audio file. Did you build this natively for iOS, or are you using React Native/Expo to cross-platform it?

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adola_ring_2026 101 days ago

We’re seeing the same 'subscription fatigue' in the hardware space. I’m part of a team building Adola (https://adola.app), a smart ring for health tracking. We decided to go entirely subscription-free because the trend of paying $6/month just to see your own biometric data (Oura/Whoop) is starting to feel like a tax on health.

It’s refreshing to see more devs pivoting back to one-time purchases or hybrid models. Hardware is harder to do that with because of cloud/server costs for the data, but we’re betting that users prefer owning their device over renting their biometrics.

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PureMeditate 108 days ago

Thanks, I appreciate that :) It's native, built with Swift and SwiftUI. I'm not a huge fan of React/JS stuff, if I'm honest. My work history is Java and C# so Swift fit me better.

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