For investors & angels
ActiveGotchi is a pre-launch iOS + watchOS health companion. It sells for $19.99 once, runs its AI entirely on the user's device, and therefore costs approximately nothing to serve, forever. Below is the case, including the parts that argue against us.
Fitness apps show you charts. Wearables vibrate at you. Nothing actually cares whether you show up. People abandon streak counters and ignore notification badges for one structural reason: there is no emotional cost to quitting.
And the apps that do try to care want $10 a month, forever, plus a copy of the user's health data in their cloud.
We attach a consequence to the behaviour. The pet's life is a direct function of the user's real Apple Health activity, and in Mortal Mode it can permanently die. That converts an abstract goal ("walk more") into a relationship the user does not want to lose.
Crucially, the mechanism is attachment, not guilt. The product never shames, never punishes, and never turns red at the user — because a habit product that makes people feel bad gets deleted. That constraint is written into the product philosophy, not bolted on.
The decisive architectural choice is that inference happens on the user's phone. That single fact removes the cost line that normally forces a consumer AI app into a subscription — and with it, the churn treadmill.
| Revenue (one-time) | $19.99 | |
|---|---|---|
| Store fee (15%) | −$3.00 | Apple/Google small-business rate |
| AI cost | $0 | Local inference — no cloud model to pay for |
| Video cost | $0 | Generative video was dropped, deliberately |
| Infra | ≈$0 | No server in the loop, or CF free tier |
| Net per customer | ≈ $17 | Once — and it is pure margin |
≈ $0
Marginal cost per user per month — forever. No metering, no fair-use policy, no cost anxiety at scale.
≈ $85k
Net at 5,000 customers, one-time. Cosmetic packs ($2.99–4.99) add revenue on top.
0
Servers in the health-data path. There is nothing to scale, and nothing to breach.
One-time pricing caps LTV. We are choosing roughly $17 + packs per customer over the $60+ a subscription could compound to. We take that deal knowingly, in exchange for zero cost risk, radical operational simplicity for a solo developer, and a genuinely differentiated anti-subscription and privacy position. The funded-updates rule is the guard: the base app is complete forever at $19.99, and ongoing development is funded by cosmetic packs — which ship with v1, not "later".
Tamagotchi-style apps exist. Health dashboards exist. What does not exist is the combination — and the combination is hard to assemble by accident:
HRV, resting heart rate, sleep quality and BMI drive the pet — not a step count and a streak.
Unlocked over roughly a year of genuine activity. It cannot be bought or rushed, so it means something.
One shared vector design system renders the same pet on the phone, the watch and this page. That craft is the product.
The pet writes to you with no cloud, no per-message cost and no transcript of anyone's life on a server.
Any one of these is copyable. Shipping all four, with no subscription, is a different proposition — and every competitor with a cloud AI bill has a structural reason not to follow.
We are not pitching an idea. The core app is built and working — four animated pets, Apple Health sync, the food economy, XP and levelling, on-device coaching, the local AI morning letter, an Apple Watch app, widgets and a Live Activity. It is in TestFlight, and it has not launched publicly.
Target public launch is Q4 2026 (per the campaign plan). We have deliberately not put a launch date on the public landing page, because plans are not promises.
The planned crowdfunding goal is $40,000. Because every model runs on the user's device, that money funds craft, not server bills — production polish, real-device QA, the species-pack pipeline, and the Android release if we decide it is a launch requirement.
If you invest in consumer health, in privacy-first architecture, or you simply want to see the build, the founder answers his own email.
lukas.chylik@gmail.com