Vs subscriptions
Pollen & Sneeze Diary vs the monthly bill
The health record aisle is stacked with subscriptions: MyFitnessPal at $79.99 a year, and Cronometer at $59.99 a year, or $10.99 a month. The Pollen & Sneeze Diary is one HTML file that does the honest working core of what those tools sell, once, for the price of a Swiss Knife.
The bill you were quietly paying
Name the actual products and the arithmetic stops being abstract: MyFitnessPal ($79.99 a year: food logging without the ads), Cronometer ($59.99 a year, or $10.99 a month: micronutrients, cloud-stored), Flo (cycle data on someone else's server). An average health stack lands at $5 to $7 a month, forever.
Run that out five years and Cronometer costs $300, MyFitnessPal costs $400. A Swiss Knife, with the Pollen & Sneeze Diary folded in beside up to eleven other tools, is $95, once.
20 months of Cronometer at $59.99 a year come to the price of a Swiss Knife at $95. Every year after that is pure savings on this category.
What the Pollen & Sneeze Diary replaces cleanly
Every spring the same mystery: what, exactly, is your nose objecting to this week? The Pollen & Sneeze Diary logs each day's severity — from Clear through Itchy and Sneezy to Fully at war — along with your prime suspect and any notes. That is the working shape most subscriptions in this category are wrapped around; the Pollen & Sneeze Diary delivers it without the wrapper.
Concretely: MyFitnessPal would keep date, severity, suspect, and notes on its own servers, behind its own login, on its own pricing schedule. The Pollen & Sneeze Diary keeps the same fields in a file on your disk — same shape of work, no monthly line on the card.
You keep the workflow. You lose the login, the sync outage, the price hike email, and the export deadline.
What you honestly give up
Team collaboration in real time. Auto-import from third-party APIs. A mobile app that pings you. MyFitnessPal does those things and does them properly; if any of them are load-bearing for how you work today, keep paying MyFitnessPal — the Pollen & Sneeze Diary is not trying to compete on those fronts.
Most people, honestly, were paying for features they did not use. The Pollen & Sneeze Diary is what remains when you strip that back to the tool.
What you stop renting
- MyFitnessPal: $79.99 a yearFood logging without the ads. $79.99 a year, every year.
- Cronometer: $59.99 a year, or $10.99 a monthMicronutrients, cloud-stored. $59.99 a year, every year.
Questions people ask
How does the cost compare to MyFitnessPal?
Cronometer runs about $300 over five years and MyFitnessPal about $400. 20 months of Cronometer at $59.99 a year come to the price of a Swiss Knife at $95. A Swiss Knife folds the Pollen & Sneeze Diary in with up to eleven other tools for $95, once, and there is no year two.
Is the Pollen & Sneeze Diary a like-for-like replacement for MyFitnessPal?
For the working core — date, severity, suspect, and notes — yes. For food logging without the ads, no. We would rather say that plainly than sell you a switch you'll regret in a fortnight.
What if my needs grow past a single file?
Excellent problem. Keep the Pollen & Sneeze Diary for what it does well; add a specialised SaaS on top only when you have a specialised need. Nothing here locks you in — it is a file.
Can I import my current data?
The Pollen & Sneeze Diary is deliberately hand-entered. Two minutes of typing on Monday keeps you closer to your own health record than an integration ever will.
The subscription was renting the arithmetic. Buy the arithmetic instead.