u/EggplantGreedy8457

A couple weeks ago I posted LifeBurn here

The idea was simple

Instead of looking at something and seeing $200, LifeBurn shows you what that purchase actually costs in hours of your life

$200 -> 8 hours
$600 -> 24 hours
and so on ...

I honestly wasn't sure if anyone besides me would find that useful, but you guys gave me a lot to think about

So I went back and worked on it
The new update is a pretty big one

I cleaned up the whole experience, made converting a price much faster, improved the way the actual time cost is shown, polished the UI, and made the "think about it" flow feel much more useful before an impulse purchase.

The goal is still the same

I'm not trying to tell you "don't buy it."

I just want there to be one tiny moment before you spend

"Is this thing actually worth X hours of my life?"

Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes

Sometimes seeing "3 days of work" makes you put the thing back 😂

Anyway, the updated version is live on the App Store now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lifeburn-real-cost-calculator/id6770055817

Still a solo dev building this, so I'm genuinely curious:

What's the FIRST thing you'c change after using it?

I'll probably steal the some suggestion for the next update 😉, and thank you for reading

Last Friday I bought a $200 mechanical keyboard at 2am, Wore off by Monday, barely touched it since

The problem wasn't really the $200 It's that the number didn't mean anything to me in the moment. Tap, pay, done, no friction at all so afterwards I sat down and did the math what did that actually cost me in hourss worked.

I make about $1,200 a month, Once I broke that down to an hourly rate, the keyboard wasn't $200, it was almost 29 hours, Close to a full week of work, gone, for plastic switches I stopped noticing after a week

That number actually got to me more than the price ever did, so I built LifeBurn

How it works, you put in your hourly rate once, then whenever you're about to buy something you open the app and type the price. Instead of $200 it just tells you 29 hours, From there you can buy it anyway, save it to a wishlist for later, or set a 60 mins timer and it'll ping you after to ask if you still want it, Most of the time by then I don't

I think a lot of us are decent at managing our actual work and systems, then completely lose it the second we're half asleep scrolling a shopping app at midnight. This was my attempt at closing that gap for myself

Free to try
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lifeburn-real-cost-calculator/id6770055817

Still figuring out if this is actually useful past me, so if you try it, tell me what worked and what didn't, Trying to make it better, not just ship it and forget it

Last year I bought a $420 jacket at midnight on my phone. Wore it twice

The problem wasn't the price. It was that $420 felt abstract. Tap, pay, done no friction, no thought. So I started doing the math in my head, what does this actually cost me in hours worked?

That reframe destroyed the urge instantly, i was making around 20$ an hour at the time. That jacket wasn't $420 it was almost 3 days of my life sitting at a desk. 21 hours. Gone, For a jacket I didn't even need

I couldn't find an app that just did this one thing fast, so I built LifeBurn.

How it works

You enter your hourly rate, then enter the price of whatever you are about to buy. It instantly converts it into real working hours. So instead of seeing $420 you see 21 hours of your life. From there you can save the item to a wishlist and come back to it later, set a one hour reminder to give yourself time to think before deciding, or go ahead and purchase it if you still feel it is worth your time after seeing the real cost.

A lot of us here are pretty good at tracking tasks and systems but the moment we open a shopping app at night all of that goes out the window. This was my way of fighting back.

Currently live on TestFlight, completely free.

https://testflight.apple.com/join/SGK5y2ca

Curious does the hourly reframe actually change your behavior, or does your brain just override it anyway? Genuinely want to know if this works for people other than me and thnak you for reading