Why I Built Relimie

Like most apps of this kind, Relimie started with a personal story. A while ago I was wrestling with the same question many people quietly carry: how do I keep my drinking under control?

I got the usual advice. Find new interests. Pick up a hobby. Keep yourself busy. Some of it helped, but a lot of it felt vague. The pieces that actually stuck were the practical ones: keep a log of what you drink, and write down the moments when an urge or a craving shows up.

So I went looking for an app to do exactly that. I tried several over quite a long time, but none of them really did the job. Most just let you log your drinks and handed back the same charts about them. Only a few offered any kind of diary, and even those felt thin.

Then something small changed everything. One of the free apps I was using, for whatever reason, showed my average daily consumption in grams of pure alcohol. Just one number. Over time I started building a whole mental system around it.

At first it was simply interesting to compare myself against the average for the country I live in, mostly to find out how bad things really were. (The honest answer: not that bad. I was actually slightly below average.) Then came the obvious next wish: hold that level, and don't drink more than that average.

You can't really do that by policing every single day. My average was around 40 g a day, which is roughly two glasses of wine. (And to be honest, anyone who can comfortably stay under two glasses a day without it turning into a struggle probably doesn't need an alcohol tracker at all.) What worked was watching the long run. As long as my average stayed under that line over time, the occasional bigger evening didn't undo my progress. That single shift in perspective is what finally helped me get things under control. Without knowing the words for it at the time, I was practicing what people now call mindful drinking and the sober-curious approach: not quitting, just paying attention and gently cutting down.

Somewhere along the way the idea arrived: build an app around exactly this method. That is how Relimie was born. And I'm genuinely happy that it can now help other people too, not just me.

One honest note about money. I would love for Relimie to be completely free. But I'm an indie developer, and building Relimie takes a real amount of time, even with a lot of help from generative AI. To keep it alive and improving, I have to monetize it to some extent. The core stays free, and I've tried to keep the rest fair. Thank you for being here, and I hope Relimie helps you the way the idea behind it once helped me.