Apps
used to come
in a box.

The story

I'm an eighties kid. I watched the internet come alive, bought software in boxes, and was working in a phone store the day the iPhone 3G came out. I've seen how things were, how they changed, and roughly when they went wrong. The subscription model has crept into everything, and most of the time it makes no sense, especially for apps that don't really change. Bug fixes and minor improvements aren't new features, that's just doing your job. At least to me.

Some things were better back in the day. Paying once and keeping it forever wasn't one of those things that needed to go away.

The moment that pushed me over the edge was small. I moved house, switched up my training setup, and needed to swap an exercise in the gym app I was using. It wanted a subscription for that, so I opened an old app I'd already paid for years before. They'd quietly moved everything to a subscription and wiped out what I'd bought. They offered me a credit, which would have covered about two months. That was enough, so I built Rackd.

How it works

Some things were better back in the day. Like paying once and keeping it forever. One price, one time, and the app is yours. The yearly sub is there if monthly billing genuinely suits you better, and it unlocks the same things as the one-time bundle. But the one-time is the real option, not a decoy. Two years of the sub already costs more than owning the whole thing forever. If you give me an option of paying for a really good app at a fair price once, or paying monthly for as long as I have it, I'd choose one-time any day. You might feel the same way.

The incentive is on me to keep making Rackd better and keep people lifting with it, not repackage existing features and sell them again. That's the Rackd business model: up front, no surprises later.

You vs. You

Rackd keeps the focus on you. There's no social feed, no followers, no leaderboards. The lifter at the next rack doesn't change what you have to do today to be stronger than last week. Rackd tracks your numbers: last session, training max, PRs, progression. That's the only comparison worth thinking about.

Built to be the best

The goal is to build one of the best workout tracking apps ever made. 15 built-in programs (5/3/1, 5x5, PPL, Upper/Lower, and more, with requests always welcome), 11 progression systems that match the original intent of those programs, and 303 exercises in a library that keeps growing. You show up, log what you lifted, and the app handles the math for your next session. Every feature gets built properly, nothing ships until it feels right, and the people using Rackd shape what gets built next. If you write in, I read it.