An intermittent fasting tracker that costs nothing and sees nothing

Open the App Store and search "intermittent fasting." You will get pages of apps, almost all of them with the same basic shape: a countdown timer to your next meal, a few canned fasting schedules like 16:8 and 18:6, and a paywall somewhere within thirty seconds of opening the app.

This is the part people accept because they are told to: of course a fasting tracker needs a subscription. Of course it needs an account. Of course your fasting history lives on someone else's server. None of those things are true, and the pattern is mostly a business decision, not a product one.

This piece is about what an honest intermittent fasting tracker actually needs to do, what almost none of it requires, and how you can track an eating window for free without handing your health data to a company you have never heard of.

What a fasting tracker actually has to do

Strip away the branding and an intermittent fasting app only has to do three things:

Know when your last meal ended.
Know when your next meal starts.
Show you the gap in between.

That's it. Everything else — the cartoon mascot, the celebratory animations, the quoted research on autophagy, the leaderboard, the push notification saying "Great job, you've been fasting 4 hours!" — is marketing. The underlying technology is a subtraction problem. Your phone can already do it.

What the popular fasting apps do with that simple math

They wrap it in things you did not ask for. A subscription, usually between $40 and $100 a year. An account that requires your email and sometimes more. Analytics SDKs that quietly send your fasting data to advertisers and third parties. Engagement mechanics designed to make you open the app fifteen times a day. Aggressive push notifications. Before-and-after photo prompts that nudge you toward a diet-culture framing the app pretended it was not about.

All of that is in service of one goal: converting you into a paying user and keeping you paying. It is not in service of your fast.

There is nothing inherently evil about subscription businesses. But the specific pattern of subscription + health data + engagement-maximising design deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets, because health data is not interchangeable with other kinds of data. It is some of the most sensitive information you own. Once it has been uploaded to somebody else's servers, you cannot take it back.

The case for automatic detection instead of manual timers

There is also a quieter problem with conventional fasting apps: the manual start/stop timer.

When you use a fasting app with a start and stop button, you are performing a ritual rather than recording reality. You open the app. You tap "end fast." You begin eating. An hour later you finish eating and forget to tap "start fast" for three more hours. By the weekend you are not sure whether you actually did 16:8 or 14:10 or something else entirely.

A better model is to skip the timer entirely and simply record the meals as they happen, then let the app compute the fasting window by subtraction. If you tap when you eat, your fasting window is the time between taps. There is no timer to start, no timer to forget. The app is watching the meals, not the clock.

This is how Ridma handles it. You log meals with a single tap. Ridma draws your eating window and fasting window automatically from the gaps. There is nothing to start. There is nothing to end. If you forget to open the app for a week, you just log the next meal when you remember and the picture fills itself back in.

"But what about all the features?"

Here is what the expensive fasting apps offer that Ridma does not:

Preset fasting schedules (16:8, 18:6, 20:4, OMAD): Ridma has no preset schedules because it does not set schedules at all. It shows you the rhythm you are actually eating on. If you want to target 16:8, you can see when you are and are not achieving it, without the app telling you whether you "succeeded" or "failed."
Fasting stages and autophagy timers: The scientific basis for the specific "fasting stage" claims that most fasting apps make is a lot thinner than the marketing implies. We do not show them because we cannot make them honestly.
Community feeds and leaderboards: We think this is the wrong incentive structure for a body.
Before/after photo tracking: We are uninterested in this, on principle.
Integration with a bathroom scale: Also no, for the same reason.

What Ridma offers instead: the actual underlying thing. An honest, private record of when you eat and when you don't. An automatic, calm visualization of the windows. No cost, no account, and no data leaving your phone.

What "nothing leaves your phone" actually means

Most apps that claim privacy will bury a list of tracking partners in their privacy policy. Ridma's claim is narrower and stronger: there are no servers to send data to. The app has no backend. We did not build one. We deliberately did not build one, because the easiest way to guarantee we never misuse your data is to not have it at all.

This is sometimes called "on-device" or "local-first," and it is a real architectural choice. It means:

Your meal logs live in your phone's on-device storage and nowhere else.
If you enable iCloud backup, Apple syncs your data between your own devices, end-to-end encrypted. We never see it.
There is no account because there is no server that would know what the account was for.
There is no analytics pipeline. We do not know you downloaded the app.

When people ask "how do you know the app is working, then?" the honest answer is: App Store reviews and emails from people who write in. That is genuinely all the feedback we get, and it is enough.

The simplest switch you can make

If you are already using a paid intermittent fasting app and you like it, keep using it. This is not a crusade. But if you have been meaning to cancel the subscription, if the notifications have started to feel nagging, or if you would like a tracker that does the one thing a fasting tracker is actually for and nothing else: there is a free, private, gentler option, and it is probably a better fit than you expect.

The eating window was there all along. All you needed was an honest tool to show it to you.