I built Pipkin because I was the parent doing the middle-of-the-night logging, and I got tired of guessing. The category has a clear leader, and my first instinct was to study its feature list. That was the wrong document. I pulled 1,708 App Store reviews of it instead, US and UK, going back to 2017, and read the lot. The useful signal wasn't in the one-star reviews. It was in the five-star ones. Around a fifth of the people who gave it five stars still complained about the pricing in the same breath. They loved it and resented it at the same time. Four things came back year after year: basics behind a paywall, entries that silently failed to save, predictions nobody could interrogate, widgets that didn't work. So the build was mostly decided for me. Free forever to track, written down as a dated pledge so I can't quietly walk it back later. Local-first on your own iCloud, no account, nothing to log into at 4am. Rule-based predictions that show their reasoning, so you can disagree with them. One subscription that covers both parents, invited by scanning a code. The call I'm least sure about: Pipkin refuses to give advice. It will not tell you what to do with your baby. It shows you what your baby actually does, and stops there. The money in this category is in telling parents what to do, so this may turn out to be an expensive principle. I'd rather find out than hedge it. Honest limitations: iPhone only, no Android, no web. Co-parent sharing needs both parents on iOS. And it's days old, so it has almost no ratings yet. Built solo around a day job, with Claude Code doing a lot of the typing. Happy to get into that if anyone's interested. A question I'd genuinely like opinions on: where's the line between a tool that informs you and one that tells you what to do? I've drawn it hard on one side and I'm not certain I'm right.

Pipkin

The baby tracker app that doesn't paywall the basics

The baby tracker app that doesn't paywall the basics