I'm a product designer. I notice things — flows, friction, the small decisions that reveal what a product actually values. When I started looking at pregnancy apps, what I noticed wasn't reassuring.
The apps were convenient. Some were even beautiful. But underneath the friendly interface, the data policies told a different story: health information, cycle data, pregnancy outcomes — collected, stored on remote servers, shared with advertising partners, sometimes sold. Intimate data, treated as inventory.
This bothered me in a specific way. Not just as a privacy concern in the abstract, but as a design problem. The architecture of those apps — cloud backends, user accounts, data lakes — wasn't accidental. It was a deliberate choice that made data collection possible. And once you build that way, the incentive to monetise it is always there.
I wanted to build something structurally incompatible with that model. No cloud backend means no data to sell. Not as a policy, but as a fact of the architecture. That constraint became the foundation of Zorya.
I built it for experienced mothers — women on their second or third pregnancy who don't need a tutorial on what a trimester is, who want a calm, private space to log and reflect without being talked down to or tracked. The app I would have wanted to exist.
Zorya is made under my design studio, Mokkup, as an indie product. It's small, intentional, and completely independent. The name comes from the Slavic dawn goddess — a quiet, protective presence. That felt right.