SEP Tracker: some apps should always be free

How have you been since your last appointment?

At every consultation with the neurologist, my wife faces the same question: she has to sum up six months of living with MS, detailing symptoms, relapses, good days and bad days, entirely from memory.

Before SEP Tracker, her answer was often: “I don’t remember.”

An app that did not exist. Or rather: one that cost too much.

Multiple sclerosis tracking apps did exist, but they were paid. When I had the idea for SEP Tracker, my first instinct was to look for existing solutions. But I could not bring myself to charge someone for managing a chronic illness day to day. That is not a pose, it is a red line for me.

SEP Tracker would be free.

She did not yet know I was working on it.

I started alone, without really knowing where I was heading. It quickly became clear that I needed her expertise. I do not live with MS; I live alongside it and understand it from a distance, but the details — the real ones — are the ones she knows.

Her precision in choosing the symptom tags was essential. She also corrected me on something that looked trivial: treatment reminders. I had originally planned a rolling 30-day cycle, but she explained that the right cycle was 28 days, exactly four weeks.

Thirty days, twenty-eight days. It may sound insignificant, but for someone on a recurring treatment it matters.

Local storage = non-negotiable.

SEP Tracker stores all data locally on the device. No data passes through servers, and no account is required. The app is entirely in the user’s hands.

This is not a technical limitation, it is a deliberate decision. When it comes to health, symptoms and treatments, that data belongs to one person only — and we see enough services get breached and enough data leak as it is; let’s not add to it.

The PDF that sums up the tracking.

The PDF export was in the spec from day one. It is precisely one of the app’s reasons to exist: letting users turn up at their appointment with six months of tracking, printable, emailable, and readable in thirty seconds.

My wife uses the app, and now the question “Do you remember what happened?” has an answer.

The details you do not anticipate.

There are features in SEP Tracker I had not originally seen as essential, and which turned out to be indispensable: the details you can record about the treatments you take.

Some MS treatments are administered by injection, and it matters to rotate the injection sites to avoid irritation. Simple enough in theory, but fatigue and daily life can easily make you forget where the last injection went. Now, when she takes her treatment, she records the injection site and can check the previous ones before the next round.

My wife uses that feature regularly. It is not extraordinary, just useful. That is often what separates an app you keep from an app you delete.

App #4

SEP Tracker is my fourth app, and the first genuinely “useful” one. It came after CineRank, Clearly and DayRank. I am getting to know the process well: the MVP, the first versions, and the feedback that overturns your initial assumptions.

But none of my apps came from an origin like this one. It is not the fruit of a frustration on the sofa or a cold market analysis. It came from a person, an illness, a concrete need, and the wish to put my skills to work on something that mattered.

That may well be the best reason there is to build an app.

SEP Tracker is available free on the App Store, for iPhone. No subscription, no in-app purchases — and that is not about to change.