Vs subscriptions
Symptom Diary vs the monthly bill
On Symptom Diary:
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 Symptom 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 Symptom 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 Symptom Diary replaces cleanly
The doctor asks how long the headaches have been happening, and suddenly your memory produces nothing but fog. That is the working shape most subscriptions in this category are wrapped around; the Symptom Diary delivers it without the wrapper.
Concretely: MyFitnessPal would keep symptom, severity 1-10, date, and triggers & notes on its own servers, behind its own login, on its own pricing schedule. The Symptom 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 Symptom Diary is not trying to compete on those fronts.
Most people, honestly, were paying for features they did not use. The Symptom 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 Symptom Diary in with up to eleven other tools for $95, once, and there is no year two.
Is the Symptom Diary a like-for-like replacement for MyFitnessPal?
For the working core — symptom, severity 1-10, date, and triggers & 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 Symptom 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 Symptom 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.