Launching today
Alcophone
BAC calculator that gets your body right — and gets you home
1 follower
BAC calculator that gets your body right — and gets you home
1 follower
Most BAC apps still run on a formula from 1932 — and it can underestimate your BAC by up to 25%. Alcophone uses modern body-composition science (Norberg 2003) to get your number right, then gets you home: log real drinks from a 5,800+ database, account for food and water, watch a live countdown to sober, and check the legal limit wherever you are — every US state, Canada, Australia, the UK and India. Above zero? A one-tap ride is already on screen. No account. No server. Works offline.
Hi Product Hunt 👋 I'm the one person behind Alcophone, and today is the first time I'm showing it to people who aren't my testers. Slightly terrified. Mostly excited.
The idea came from a party. A friend of mine got unwell from drinking too much — he'd been trying to quit for months and was tracking his consumption with Alcodroid. After that night I opened every BAC calculator on the Play Store and found the same thing under the hood: a formula from 1932. Nineteen. Thirty. Two. It only knows your weight, so a lean person and someone with high body fat, same weight, get the exact same number. For the second person it can be off by 25%, and always in the dangerous direction. That bothered me more than I expected.
So I started reading the pharmacokinetics papers. The better model has existed since 2003 (Norberg): alcohol distributes into fat-free mass, not total body weight. Nobody had put it in an app, so I spent about a year of evenings doing that. The scope grew along the way: 5,800 drinks with their actual ABV and serving sizes, because a pint of 8% IPA is not "one drink"; a food and water input, because a full stomach can cut peak BAC by a third or more and the other apps ignore it; legal limits for every US state, Canadian province, Australian state, the UK and India; and 10,000+ tests, mostly around the boundary cases (what day does a drink at 2 AM belong to?).
The part I care about most isn't the math, though. It's what happens after the number: as soon as your BAC is above zero, the ride-home button is right there, and at dangerous levels one tap calls emergency services. The app never tells you it's fine to drive. It's built to do the opposite. I wish my friend had had it that night.
To be clear, it's still an estimate. A breathalyzer measures; this calculates from what you tell it, and food alone can move the result a lot. What I can say is that the model is the best one in the literature, the error runs in the safer direction, and everything stays on your phone — no account, no server, works offline.
Free with ads on Android. A one-time premium unlock (no subscription, I hate those too) adds a more personalized calculation. iOS is next.
I'll be around all day. Ask me anything — the formulas, the drink database, the 4 AM "drinking day" boundary that cost me a weekend. And if you've ever had that "wait, am I OK to drive?" moment: this is for that moment.