What Multi does differently
The problem
Your day doesn't come pre-sorted into "tasks," "habits," and "expenses." You just have things to keep track of — pick up dry cleaning, go to the gym, the $40 you spent on it. But every app you'd use to manage that assumes otherwise. So you end up with three apps open at once: a to-do list, a habit tracker, and a budgeting app — each holding a third of your day, none of them talking to each other.
That fragmentation isn't a minor inconvenience. It means:
Duplicate entry. A recurring bill lives in your budgeting app and, separately, as a reminder in your to-do list, because neither app understands it's the same thing viewed two ways.
Context switching. Checking "what do I need to do, keep up, and not overspend on today" means opening three apps and mentally stitching the answer together yourself.
The wrong tool for gray-area items. A gym habit you're paying a monthly fee for isn't a task, a habit, or an expense on its own — it's all three, and most apps force you to pick one.
Multi's core insight is structural, not cosmetic: a task, a habit, and an expense aren't three kinds of things — they're one thing wearing different attributes.
An item with no repeat rule is a task. Add a repeat rule, and it's a habit. Attach an amount, and it's an expense. Do both, and it's a recurring expense — rent, a subscription, anything that repeats and costs something.
This isn't just a backend simplification — it's the entire interaction model. Instead of choosing a category from a menu before you've even written the thing down, you create with one gesture and shape it as you go: drag a line up, and it starts repeating (further up, more often). Drag it down, and an amount field slides in. The shape of the gesture is the shape of the item. Nothing is decided in advance and then edited later — it's decided by how you draw it.
That same idea — a flat line is a task, a wave is a habit, a doubled line means money — runs through the entire app: the icon, the tab bar, the way a habit's history is visualized (as a heartbeat-like wave instead of a grid of checkboxes), even the completion animation. It's not decoration sitting on top of the data model. It is the data model, made visible.
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