Curabrein
You buy it once and then it is yours.
No subscription, no advertising, no account, and no second payment for the part you actually needed.
once, and the app is yours
Comparable apps: €4 to €10 every month
Bought through Google Play, so their refund terms apply.
What you are getting
- Your energy, and what it cost you. Five levels and one tap on a bad day. Spoons and a budget if you count that way.
- Crashes, with your own delay. Not twelve to forty-eight hours from a study. The number your own weeks work out to.
- Months of your days on one grid. The thing you can hand to somebody and say: look, this is what it has been like.
- Twenty exercises that never push you. Filtered by your conditions, so nothing unsafe for you can turn up.
- Eighty-four conditions, written for a bad day. Short paragraphs, plain words, and it will read them aloud if that is easier.
- The document for your doctor. Print it, mail it, or hand over your phone.
The body map, symptoms, sleep, mood, cycle, medication and reminders, four companions and four themes are all in there too. Nothing is locked and nothing is a higher tier. Everything, in detail →
Because then you would be the product.
An advertising network inside a health app means somebody is being told which conditions you looked up and how bad your week was. That is the one thing this app promises never happens.
It would also be impossible to keep. Curabrein has no internet permission at all, and adverts have to be fetched from somewhere. The moment you add advertising, the promise is gone. So there is no advertising.
A bill every month is the wrong shape for this.
Most apps in this corner charge somewhere between four and ten euro a month, and put the parts you actually need behind the higher plan: the export, the reports, the full history.
The people this app is for are often living on less because of their illness. Being ill is already expensive. Appointments, medication, the hours you cannot work. A bill that arrives every month for the rest of your life is not a small thing when your income is the thing your illness took first.
And an app that holds your own health record hostage until you pay again is worse than one that never existed. You wrote those months down yourself. They are yours.
Nine euro ninety-nine, once. Use it for three years and that is twenty-eight cents a month. Use it for one week and decide it is not for you, and it cost less than a coffee. You keep it either way.
Where the money goes
This app was not built to make a profit. It was built because it ought to exist. But it does have to pay for itself, because an app that earns nothing stops being maintained one day, and then it goes quiet on the phone of somebody who was counting on it.
What comes in goes back in. The more people buy it, the more conditions can be written and the more exercises get added. That is the whole plan: keep it alive and make it better, so it can help more people.
In practice that means the developer account, the certificates, the test devices, and the time it takes to keep everything working while Android changes underneath it.
Mostly it pays for the writing. Eighty-four condition pages had to be researched, written and checked one at a time, and they have to stay current. That is the slowest and least visible part of this app, and it is the part that has to be right. More are being added, and that work does not stop.
What you are not paying for: servers, because there are none. Your record lives on your phone and nowhere else, so there is nothing to run and nothing for anyone to break into.
What happens next time
Your copy improves when the app improves. New conditions, new exercises, whatever gets fixed and added, all of it arrives as a normal update. That is what buying something used to mean, and it would be nice if it kept meaning that.