u/Express_Astronomer99

I was at the gym last week. 🏋️‍♂️ Between sets, I asked myself: What in my week is genuinely taking up a lot of my time & is low-key annoying to keep up with but actually worth doing? 🤔

Tracking came to mind immediately. 📝

Not because I enjoy it - but because it worked. 🎯 I lost around 10 lbs doing it consistently, kept up with my hobbies, and felt more in control. 📈 The problem was that I kept stopping. 🛑

Here's the full arc:
Started with Excel. 📊 Clean rows, manual entry, completely joyless. A few weeks in, quietly abandoned. 🤫

Moved to Notion. 🚀 Started simple - just a table. Then got carried away. 💻

Toggles, formulas, and a 🐷 emoji that auto-appeared when I went over my calorie goal. I was weirdly proud of that page and even enjoyed using it!

But I was still running Excel in parallel for food macros, so every evening came with a low-grade admin tax. 🧾

Despite multiple iterations to make it more fun over a period of five months, I burned out. 🔥 Stopped for two weeks. Came back. Stopped again. 🔄

The problem was never motivation - I knew tracking helped. 💡

It was the friction between wanting to track and actually doing it. ⚙️

So I built Tally.

📲 A PWA that lives on my home screen like a native app. ✨
Snap a photo of your meal 📸 or type "Just Salad Cilantro Lime Chicken Bowl" 🥗 and it estimates your macros before you confirm. Logs Veggies automatically. 🥦 Everything I was doing across two apps now happens with a few taps in a single place. ⚡

No account. ❌ No cloud. ☁️ No subscription. 🚫 Your data stays on your phone. 🔒

The thing that surprised me most: the best decisions I made were deletions.

✂️ Every feature I cut that seemed useful but I never actually used made the app noticeably better. 🚀

Still using it every day. 💪 Still making progress. 📈 (weekends are clearly an area of improvement 😢 though)

Note: The optional AI/text food scan feature requires a Google API Key, which is free of cost and lets you request/scan around 20-500 items, depending on the model you pick. 🧠

My parents don't live in the same city as me. So when I go silent/unresponsive for a while they dont stress.

Find My exists but it doesn't really help. They see "28 Liberty St" and that means nothing to them. They don't know the city. "At the movies, Alamo Drafthouse" is something they actually understand. That context is what turns "where is he?" into "ah, he's fine." So when my phone goes silent, they don't wonder/stress; they just check the page.

So I built a simple status page that translates the data from my mobile into something they actually understand.
It shows one of these at any given time:
🏠 Home
💼 At Work
🚇 Commuting
😴 Sleeping
🏋️ Gym
🏊 Swimming
🏸 Badminton
🎬 Movies
🌆 Out & About

They just bookmark the URL and check it whenever they want. No app, no account, nothing to install on their end.

How it works:
iOS Shortcuts detect triggers (location, WiFi, MTA card tap, time) and fire a POST request
Cloudflare Worker receives it and stores the status in KV
The page reads from KV and shows the current status
Took about 40 minutes. About 150 lines of code, most of it is just the HTML/CSS for the page itself. Runs free on Cloudflare.
One thing I noticed: because the Shortcuts only fire on a trigger rather than constantly polling, it has been easier on battery than having Find My running. Anecdotal but worth mentioning.

Happy to share the worker code if anyone wants to build this for themselves.

Note: Commented a picture of the architecture and presets preview :)

I over-engineered a Notion tracker with a 🐷 emoji and still quit. So I built something simpler.

Built a status page for my parents so they stop worrying when I don't pick up