Hi Product Hunt 👋 The Change started with my wife—and a Replit buildathon. My wife was experiencing the effects of perimenopause, and around the same time Replit announced a buildathon that gave me an excuse to finally build an app of my own. There was just one problem: **I didn't know what to build.** So I did something that now feels strangely appropriate. I worked with Gemini to research underserved categories in the App Store. One opportunity kept standing out: **perimenopause.** There were plenty of period trackers. There were menopause apps. And there were products that asked women to manually log symptom after symptom. But perimenopause sits somewhere in between. Your cycle may still be there, but it starts changing. Hot flashes appear. Sleep changes. Brain fog. Mood changes. Weight changes. And suddenly there are a lot of questions that don't fit neatly into a symptom tracker. I kept coming back to one idea: **Maybe women didn't need another tracker. Maybe they needed someone they could talk to.** So for the buildathon, I built the first version of The Change—an AI coach specifically for perimenopause. It worked. But what happened *after* the buildathon changed the entire product. I started reading reviews of women's health apps in the App Store. One concern kept getting my attention: **Privacy.** If women were going to talk to The Change about periods, sleep, sex, weight, mood, relationships and some of the most personal questions they have about their bodies, I didn't want those conversations being sent to a cloud AI provider simply because that was the easiest way to build an AI app. So I made a decision that would consume the next eight months: **Remove the cloud dependency.** What started as a buildathon prototype became an eight-month experiment in answering a much harder question: **Could we put the intelligence on the phone instead?** Eventually, it worked. Today, The Change runs its AI coach locally on the iPhone, so personal conversations don't need to be processed by a cloud LLM. That decision changed more than privacy. It changed the economics of the product too. Most AI companies eventually have to figure out how to charge customers for inference. **We moved inference onto hardware the customer already owns.** So if you're awake at 2 AM with a question, ask it. If the answer leads to another question, ask that too. And another. **There shouldn't be a meter on reassurance.** What started as a buildathon project has become something much more ambitious: a private AI coach designed specifically to help women understand and navigate the transition into menopause. I'd love for the Product Hunt community to try what I've spent the last eight months building and tell me what you think. — Kevin

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p/the-change

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2mo ago

Is on-device inference the next big shift in consumer AI?

I ve spent much of the past eight months exploring a question that started out fairly simple:

How much of an AI product actually needs the cloud?

I m building The Change, a private AI coach for perimenopause. Early on, it worked the way most AI apps do: the phone was essentially the interface, while the intelligence lived somewhere else.

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The Change

Private AI for perimenopause, entirely on your iPhone.

Private AI for perimenopause, entirely on your iPhone.

Forum Threads

Is on-device inference the next big shift in consumer AI?

Forum Threads

Is on-device inference the next big shift in consumer AI?