ZORYA

I want to tell you exactly when I knew I had to build something different.

I was a few weeks pregnant with my first child. I had downloaded one of the popular pregnancy apps, the kind with the fruit comparisons and the weekly countdowns, the kind that gets recommended in every parenting forum. I set it up, entered my due date, and started using it.

About two weeks later, I started seeing ads for prams.

That might sound like a coincidence. It was not. I had not searched for prams. I had not browsed any baby shops. The only place I had entered information about my pregnancy was inside that app. And now, something, some piece of code, some data pipeline I had agreed to without reading — had passed that information somewhere that turned it into a targeting signal.

I felt, honestly, a little sick.

Not because of the ad. But because of what it meant. My pregnancy, something I had not even told my family about yet, was already being used as a data point in a commercial system. Someone, somewhere, had a file on me that said: pregnant, due date approximately here, show her prams.

I went and read the privacy policy properly for the first time. It was long. It named “partners.” It talked about “personalised experiences.” It had a section about sharing with third-party analytics providers, and another about advertising networks. There was a line about how data might be used after account deletion, retained for “legitimate business purposes” for up to five years.

None of this was hidden. It was all there in the document I had scrolled past when I signed up. But I had not expected it, and that is the point. When you download a pregnancy app, you are thinking about your baby. You are not thinking about data brokers.

I spent a lot of time after that reading privacy policies for other pregnancy apps. Most of them followed the same pattern: an account you have to create, cloud storage for your data, a business model that depended on knowing things about you.

I understand why that model exists. Building an app costs money. Maintaining it costs money. If you are not charging for it, or if you are charging very little for a free version, you need revenue from somewhere. Data is the revenue.

But that made me think about what I actually wanted from a pregnancy app. I wanted to track my weeks. I wanted to count kicks. I wanted a contraction timer that worked when I needed it, without asking me to create an account first. I wanted a record of my pregnancy that belonged to me.

I did not want to be part of someone’s advertising data set.

The idea for Zorya came from that frustration. What if the app simply did not have a server? What if there was no cloud, no account, no backend infrastructure that your data could flow through? Not as a promise, not “we promise we will keep your data safe”, but as a structural fact. If there is no server, there is nothing to send your data to. It cannot be shared because there is nowhere for it to go.

That is the architecture Zorya is built on. Everything you enter, your week, your kick counts, your contraction timings, your notes — stays on your phone. It does not leave unless you choose to export it yourself, as a CSV or a PDF or a summary you can bring to a midwife appointment. Even then, you control where it goes.

No account means no password to create, no email to verify, no profile that exists somewhere on a server I manage. It also means something more specific: if you lose your phone, your data does not automatically restore from the cloud, because there is no cloud backup. This is the honest tradeoff. I want to be clear about it.

What we offer instead is export. You can back up your data as a CSV or PDF and store it wherever you choose, on your computer, in your own cloud account, wherever makes sense to you. You are in control of that backup, not me.

Zorya is a one-time purchase. Twenty-four euros and ninety-nine cents, paid once. No subscription, no free tier with limited features, no moment where the app asks you to upgrade to access your own data. I priced it that way because the subscription model and the surveillance model tend to go together, when revenue depends on retaining users month after month, the incentive to collect more data, to add more nudges, to embed more engagement mechanics, grows with it.

I did not want to build that app. I have used that app. I know what it feels like.

Zorya also has a dignified archive for every pregnancy outcome. Not every pregnancy ends in a healthy birth, and a lot of pregnancy apps are not built with that in mind. The archive stores your record whatever happens. It is yours to keep, to look at or not look at, for as long as you want.

I am a product designer by background and a mother by experience. Zorya is the thing I wished had existed when I needed it. It is not trying to be everything to everyone. It does not have social features or community forums or AI-generated advice. It tracks your pregnancy, quietly and accurately, and it keeps that data on your phone.

That is what it is. I thought you deserved to know why.