The Fastful Manifesto
Fastful is a timer. It should be the least demanding app on your phone. Here is why it is built the way it is — and what it will never become.
Fasting is the oldest medicine, and it is free.
No prescription, no equipment, no membership. Every human body ships with it. Our ancestors fasted because the food ran out; monks and mystics did it on purpose; researchers are still busy putting names to what happens when a body goes a while without eating. Whatever they settle on, the practice itself will stay what it has always been: available to everyone, costing nothing.
Nobody should be able to sell you not eating.
It is a strange business, charging rent on abstinence. And yet the store is full of coaches, plans, and paywalls stacked on top of the one health practice that requires no purchase at all. The honest price for a timer is the price of a timer — paid once, by you, and then never again.
Software you buy can afford to be honest with you.
An app that has to justify a charge every month will find things to charge for. It will send notifications it doesn’t need to send, manufacture engagement it doesn’t need to manufacture, and measure you to reassure itself that you’re still worth billing. An app you already bought has nothing left to extract. It can afford to be quiet. That isn’t generosity — it’s the only business model that makes calm software possible.
You should own the things you rely on.
Fastful runs on your phone. Your history lives on your phone. There is no account, because there is nothing on our end to log into. If we disappeared tomorrow, the copy you bought would keep counting. And when you want to leave, your whole history exports to a CSV file in one tap — a plain, open format that will still open in thirty years.
Discipline is not a streak.
A streak is a slot machine wearing the costume of self-improvement: the bigger the number, the more it costs you to stop, which is precisely why it was put there. Real discipline is quieter and far more durable. It is beginning again on Tuesday after a bad Monday. Fastful keeps your streaks because they’re satisfying, and forgets them the moment they’d start to bully you.
The hunger is the practice.
Nearly every tradition that has lasted keeps a fast — Lent and Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Ekadashi, the Bahá’í fast, a hundred more. They agree on almost nothing else. They agree that choosing to want something and not take it does something to a person that comfort never will. One hour of ordinary hunger will teach you more about your appetites than a year of reading about them. That hour is the point. The app is only a clock standing beside it.
Attention is the other thing you are fasting from.
You cannot practice restraint on a device engineered to break it. So Fastful holds one number, tells you the moment you’re done, and then says nothing. No feed, no badge waiting to be cleared, no notification at eight in the evening wondering where you’ve been. The best compliment this app can be paid is that you forgot it was running.
Small, slow, and finished is the goal.
Fastful is made by one person who fasts, shipped when it’s right, and allowed to be done. Not every version needs a new feature. Sometimes the most respectful update is the one that changes nothing you can see.
So, four promises
- We will never charge a subscription for a timer.
- We will never ask you for an account, and never sell what we cannot see.
- We will never send a notification designed to make you feel bad.
- We will never hold your history hostage. One tap, CSV, take it anywhere.
Only anonymous, aggregate feature statistics ever leave the app — never who you are, never when you fasted. The privacy policy spells out exactly what and why.
— Igor Putina, who fasts.
Tell me where I’m wrong →
Now go be hungry.
One ring, on your iPhone, Apple Watch, and Home Screen. It keeps perfect time and asks for nothing else.
Pay once. No account, no subscription, nothing to cancel.