Ember · an ADHD planner for iPhone & Mac

It’s 11 a.m. and you’ve done none of it. Good. Start from here.

Ember plans your week around how ADHD actually behaves — then, when the morning doesn’t survive contact with real life, it re-plans the rest of the day from right now. Built on momentum, not streaks, so there is never anything to break.

Plan your week — free Watch it re-plan
No streaks, ever Local-first · works offline No account needed

Every planner on the App Store assumes the day will go to plan. You have ADHD. It won’t — so Ember is the first one built for what happens next.

Why the last five apps failed

It was never that you didn’t want it badly enough.

You’ve done this before. You found a beautiful app. You spent a happy Sunday setting it up — projects, tags, colours, a system that would finally hold. For nine days it was perfect. Then you missed a day. The streak went to zero, and the app that was supposed to help you turned into a small daily accusation on your home screen — so you moved it to the third page, then deleted it, and the whole thing became one more piece of evidence in a case you’ve been building against yourself since school.

Here’s what nobody tells you: the app was badly designed, and you were the one who paid for it. Almost everything on the App Store is built on four assumptions that quietly do not hold for an ADHD brain.

01

Streaks

They assume consistency is the goal. For you the streak isn’t motivation — it’s a fuse. One bad day, and the number that was carrying you becomes the reason you never open the app again.

02

The infinite list

They assume the hard part is remembering. It isn’t — you remember everything, constantly, at 3 a.m. The hard part is beginning, and a list of 84 items makes beginning harder.

03

Red for overdue

They assume urgency helps. An alarm you can’t switch off doesn’t create urgency — it creates avoidance, and then you stop opening the app that’s shouting at you.

04

The plan is sacred

They assume a plan, once made, describes the day. So by 11 a.m. the plan is fiction, the fiction is evidence against you, and the only move left is abandoning it — and the app with it.

The recovery moment

Watch a morning fail, and nothing break.

This is the moment every other planner abandons you — and the moment Ember was built for. One tap re-plans the rest of the day from the actual time on the clock. It keeps what still fits, moves what can move, and tells you honestly what it dropped. The nearest thing to an assistant of your own: one who plans your week, rebuilds your day, and never once judges the morning.

01

A week, planned in three questions

Your goals, your threads, your to-dos go in. A realistic, breathing week comes out — gaps included, because a plan with no slack is a plan you’ll abandon by Tuesday.

02

Re-plan from now

Not from 9 a.m. Not from an ideal you. From the wall clock, and from whatever the day has already done to you. The morning is never held against you.

03

It has to say what it dropped

A day that shrank by two hours has to lose something. Ember names what fell out and where it went — because a planner that pretends everything still fits is lying to you.

04

Nudges that start things

When a block begins, the notification carries a Start button. The gap between deciding and starting is the whole illness — so the app keeps making that gap one tap wide.

Tuesday 9:00 am
now
Deep work — portfolio
9:00 · 90 min
Email sweep
10:30 · 30 min
Call — accountant
11:30 · 30 min
Tax return, part 2
1:00 · 60 min
Gym
3:00 · 60 min
Afternoon re-planned from 11:04.
Dropped one thing: Tax return → Thu 9:00. The rest fits.

Live re-creation · demonstration data

Resting
The mechanism · momentum, not streaks

The lowest state is called Resting.

Not Inactive. Not Low. Not a red zone. Momentum is a rolling average, not a chain — a good day lifts it, a bad day dents it, and nothing can break it. An ember dims. It doesn’t break. That single design decision is the whole app.

One block in

Starting is worth more than finishing.

Starting a block scores 12 points. Finishing a whole project scores 10. That’s not a bug — in the behavioural literature the ADHD bottleneck isn’t motivation or memory, it’s task initiation. So the scoring reinforces the behaviour that’s actually hard.

A few honest days

Distractions cost nothing. Ever.

The moment an honest self-report lowers a number, people stop reporting honestly and the data becomes worthless. The Distracted button is free to press — it just quietly hands you your time back.

The good stretch

Absence and failure never look the same.

A day you didn’t open the app is drawn as a gap in the line — never a zero. Life happened. The app declines to render it as a verdict on you, which is why you can still open it on the bad weeks.

Where it goes

Blow on it, and it comes back.

After a break, one 25-minute block starts pulling the line up again. No apology tour, no rebuilding a number from zero. That’s what the name means: an ember is what a fire looks like when you’re not tending it — and it takes almost nothing to bring back.

Three months, honestly drawn

The line has gaps in it — three weeks where things fell apart — and it still climbs.

life happened gap, not zero JUN JUL AUG

In a streak app, this same quarter reads as four separate failures. Here it reads as what it was: a life slowly coming back, with interruptions. “Active on 13 of the last 14 days” is a count, not a streak — it cannot be broken, only slowly changed.

0
points for starting a block
Momentum.swift, line 9
0
for finishing a whole project — upside down, on purpose
0
streaks to break · points lost, ever
0%
usable offline, no account

House rules

Five rules the app is built never to break.

Not a philosophy page — constraints in the code. Each one exists because its opposite is how the last app lost you.

Rule 01

Logging a distraction can never cost you points.

The instant honesty lowers a number, honesty stops. The Distracted button is free to press — it just quietly hands you your time back.

Rule 02

Absence and failure must not look the same.

A day you didn’t use the app is drawn as a gap in the line, never as a zero. The chart refuses to render a verdict on you.

Rule 03

The lowest state is called “Resting.”

Not Inactive, not Low, not a red zone. This is the difference between a dashboard you can open on a bad week and one you avoid for a month.

Rule 04

The plan bends before you do.

When the day breaks, the plan re-forms around the time that’s actually left — and says what it dropped. A missed morning is a scheduling fact, never a moral one.

Rule 05

Five active projects. Then it says something.

Over the cap you get a calm inline note — never a block, never a warning triangle. The board still takes the sixth. It’s your life; it just tells you the truth about it.

None of this is a new idea

People worked this out a century ago.
Software just stopped listening.

1890
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
William James · The Principles of Psychology
So we builtThe Distracted button. Attention wanders — that’s not the failure, that’s the job. Pressing it costs nothing, because James was describing bringing it back as the skill.
1971
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbert A. Simon · Nobel laureate in economics
So we builtA planner that fits things to the time that exists, holds five active projects, and then says something calm. Your 84-item list isn’t a plan — it’s a tax on the one resource you’re short of.
1997
“ADHD is not a disorder of knowing what to do. It is a disorder of doing what you know.”
Dr Russell A. Barkley · ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control
So we builtA planner that decides for you, and nudges with a Start button in them. The gap is performance, not knowledge — no amount of better list-making closes it, so the app closes it instead.
1989
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard · The Writing Life
So we builtThe dashboard — not a score to chase, a record of days kept somewhere you can bear to look at it. Three months of an honest line is evidence a streak counter can never give you.

The coach

On Sunday, it writes you the truth.

The Coach reads your actual week — first touches, finished blocks, the shifts, the parked distractions, the wins — and writes what the charts can’t say. Every fact is computed from your data before a word is written; the writing only connects the dots. No pep talk. No “you’ve got this.” The kind of noticing you’d pay a coach for, from data you were never punished for producing.

Day & week reads Facts first, prose second Yours to delete
This week · read by Ember
SAMPLE · WRITTEN FROM DEMONSTRATION DATA

Local-first

Yours, even with the signal off.

Every tap writes to your device immediately — on a plane, in a basement, on the subway. There is no spinner between you and your own plan, because a planner that stalls on a bad connection is a planner you stop trusting.

Sync keeps your iPhone and Mac holding the same records, each written locally first. Neither is the companion of the other. And your data exports in one tap, because it’s yours.

The name

A name you can open in a meeting.

Your phone gets unlocked in meetings, on trains, next to family. An app named after a diagnosis makes every glance a disclosure decision — which is exactly how it ends up in a folder on the third page.

Under the icon, this one just says Ember. What it’s for stays between you and it.

Pricing

The app is free. The planner earns its keep.

An ADHD coach runs $200 a session. A therapy hour, $150. The planning part of Ember — every week, all year — is $129. And everything local is simply free, forever.

Free
$0 / forever

The complete app, on every device. Not a trial, not a crippled tier.

  • Timer, threads, daily page, momentum
  • Widgets and Live Activities
  • Sync included — iPhone & Mac
  • Your first three AI week plans, on us
  • No account needed to start
Start free
For the day that breaks Ember Plus
$129 / year

Works out at $10.75 a month — or $14.99 month to month, if you’d rather not commit to a year of anything.

  • Unlimited week planning, on our most capable model
  • Re-plan from now, whenever the day breaks
  • The Coach — day and week reads
  • Everything in Free, always
Plan your first week
Founding
$79 / year

For the first 1,000 subscribers. This price never rises for you — that’s a promise we intend to be held to.

  • Everything in Plus
  • Price locked, forever
  • A permanent stake in this thing working
Become a founder

Prices in USD; final store pricing may vary by region. Why is the AI part the paid part? Because it’s the part that costs real money every time it runs — each plan is generated fresh for your actual week on a frontier model. Sync, we can afford to give away. Honest, both ways.

Questions people actually ask

The honest answers.

Why don’t normal productivity apps work for ADHD?

Because most are built for a brain whose bottleneck is memory or planning. For an ADHD brain the bottleneck is usually task initiation — the cost of getting started at all. A longer list and a louder reminder don’t lower that cost; they raise it. Worse, streak apps attach a penalty to the exact moment you were most likely to lapse, which reliably converts one missed day into a deleted app.

Ember removes the penalty entirely, puts the reward on starting, and — the part the others skip — re-plans the day from wherever you actually are.

What happens when I miss the whole morning?

You tap once, and Ember re-plans from now. It rebuilds the rest of the day from the current time, keeps what still fits, moves what can move, and tells you plainly what it dropped and where it went. No red, no penalty, no reset — the morning is a scheduling fact, not a moral one.

Do I need an account?

No. Download it and start — no email, no onboarding survey. Ember is local-first: everything lives on your device. An account exists only to sync between devices, and sync is free.

Does it work offline?

Completely. Every action writes to your device first and never waits on a network call. Planes, tunnels, basements, dead zones — identical behaviour. This isn’t a fallback mode; it’s how the app is built, and syncing was added on top afterwards.

What happens if I stop using it for two weeks?

Nothing bad. There is no streak to lose and no number that resets. Your momentum drifts gently toward Resting, and those two weeks appear on the chart as a gap — not as a row of zeros. When you come back, one 25-minute block starts pulling the line up again. This is the single most deliberate design decision in the whole app.

What does the AI actually see?

Your goals, threads, to-dos and schedule — the things a plan is made of — sent to generate your plan, and nothing else. Facts about your week are computed as plain numbers first; the model connects them into prose. Your data stays yours: it lives on your device, syncs through your account, and exports or deletes in one tap.

Is this a medical treatment for ADHD?

No, and it would be irresponsible to imply otherwise. Ember is a productivity tool — not a medical device, a therapy, or a substitute for either. It doesn’t diagnose anything and it isn’t clinically validated.

What it is: an app whose design decisions were made deliberately, informed by behavioural research on motivation and task initiation — and by building it while living on the other side of the problem.

Who is this actually for?

People who have already tried the beautiful apps, the paper planner, the wall of sticky notes and the app with the tree that dies. People who don’t need another system — they need the gap between deciding and starting to get smaller, and a plan that survives contact with a real day.

You don’t need a diagnosis to find it useful. Plenty of people just work this way.

Lit

The next twenty‑five minutes
are available.

That’s all this needs from you. Not a new system, not a better week, not a version of yourself that has finally got it together. One block — Ember takes it from there.

Open Ember in your browser See pricing
Free to download Three plans on us No streaks to break