Independent Developer
I design and ship small, genuinely useful apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web — and every one of them is free. No subscription, no paywall, no premium tier hiding the feature you actually needed.
I've spent more than two decades as a front-end engineer, and picked up enough of the rest of the stack — backend services, databases, infrastructure — to take a product from idea to release on my own.
What bothers me is what "simple" has come to mean in app stores. A calculator. A converter. A checklist. Utilities that take hours to build well, sold as monthly subscriptions that quietly outlast their usefulness. The cost of building these apps has collapsed. The price tag hasn't.
NeuraTiM is my answer to that gap: a developer profile dedicated to building small, well-made apps with AI assistance, and releasing every one of them for free.
As a technical diver, I bring a lot of equipment to a dive site, and forgetting just one important item can end the dive before it even begins. Checklist started as a simple way to keep my preparation under control instead of relying entirely on memory. Because arriving at the water only to realize that a critical piece of equipment is still at home is not a great way to start the day.
An app very similar to this one was actually one of the reasons this entire project started. I simply wanted a reminder that would make me get up and stretch regularly while working at my computer, but once again I ran into a very basic application tied to a yearly subscription. Timer does exactly what I need: it reminds me that there is more to life than sitting in front of a screen and writing code.
Technical diving is not only about the dive itself, but also about planning it and understanding the relationships behind that plan. I have always been interested in how changing one parameter affects another, what happens if a decompression gas is lost, and how different scenarios change the entire dive. Decolab is therefore not just a planning tool, but my personal laboratory for exploring decompression and answering all those “what if?” questions.
Sometimes I go through periods when I need my day to be highly structured, see my activities clearly, and get the simple satisfaction of marking something as done. I used a similar application before, but not frequently enough to justify paying for another long-term subscription. TempoLane is my own take on lightweight planning, routines, and keeping track of what I have actually accomplished.
While travelling with friends, we often used expense-sharing apps, but over time I became frustrated by advertisements and by several things I felt were missing from the experience. Settlo is built around my own idea of how this kind of application should work: fast, clear, and flexible enough to handle more complicated situations when needed. Running the backend does cost money, so time will tell whether other users eventually help support it; if not, I will simply keep using it with my friends.
I bought Goodnotes and used it extensively, but I kept encountering areas where I wished things worked differently – from general interaction to working with tables and other elements. InkLume is my answer to what this kind of application would look like if it were designed around my own workflow. My goal is to make it available across devices without requiring another purchase for every platform, while also allowing users to keep and back up their data in their own cloud storage.
During design and development work, I surprisingly often need to do something extremely simple: resize an image, change its dimensions, and use it on GitHub or somewhere else. Yet even such a basic operation can mean searching for an online service, closing ads, or running into paid limitations. CanvasForge exists because simple image operations should actually be simple.
This is one of the most practically important applications in the entire project for me. Everyday life is full of things that expire, require regular servicing, or have deadlines I do not want to think about constantly but definitely do not want to miss. LifeCue is meant to be one place where I can store them, configure exactly how I want to be reminded, and then stop carrying those dates around in my head.
Across every application, I am trying to combine two ideas that I do not believe should be mutually exclusive: simplicity and configurability. Sometimes I want to open an app and complete a task in two taps; at other times I want control over every detail. That philosophy runs through the entire project, from the overall interface down to small interactions such as choosing participants when adding an expense in Settlo.
The purpose of this project is not to dismiss the work of developers behind existing applications. Good software represents months or years of work, and building these apps has only made me more aware of how many decisions hide behind even seemingly simple features. At the same time, I find it fascinating – and slightly unsettling – to see how much a single developer can now accomplish with the help of AI and how quickly software development itself is changing.
This month-long experiment has already cost me quite a lot of money, including an Android tablet for testing, a month of AI subscriptions, several additional models, and increased Cloudflare limits. That still excludes the value of my own time, because including it would put the project in an entirely different price range. For now, I see the whole project primarily as an intensive learning experience in how to use AI effectively as part of real-world software development.
Twelve apps exist that did not exist four weeks ago. This is the honest account of what happens to them next — and of the one new thing starting beside them.
Twelve applications in a single month. A few of them are genuinely simple. Two are large and advanced — the kind of thing I would once have measured in quarters rather than weeks. The rest sit in the middle: real apps with real edge cases, each of which took real days. All of them work. None of them is finished in the way a shipped product is finished.
The month of AI subscriptions has ended, and the pace ends with it. What follows is slower and far less glamorous: deeper testing on real devices, the remaining bugs found and fixed, and proper test suites written around every app so that a fix in one corner cannot quietly break another. Design and the small details get another pass as well. Everything works today — but “works” and “proven” are not the same word, and I would rather earn the second one.
The one thing I genuinely need is help with Google's Android testing requirement: an app cannot be released until real people have used it for real days. Beyond that, feedback — a bug, a rough edge, something that behaved in a way you did not expect. I cannot fix what I never hear about, and I would much rather hear it from you than guess.
Separately, I have started something new: an application built around AI, at ai.neuratim.com. Take it as a demonstration of what a very angry developer can do. Angry about what? Have you seen the prices? Months of subscription for a service you opened twice.
AI genuinely is not free — the models cost money and so does the infrastructure behind them. It does not have to cost that, though. So the pricing there will be usage-based and honest: you pay for what you actually create, at a price that covers the AI and the backend and nothing beyond it. Music, images, whatever comes after them — per use, not per month.
Everything on NeuraTiM stays free, forever. Most of it I built for myself, and you are welcome to use it. How far this goes from here depends on whether anyone chooses to support it — so far I do it because I enjoy it.
One month for all of this is a lot, and I will be honest with you: I am tired. I am also more excited than I have been in a long time. I believe I can do more than this — and I will.
Most of the conversation around AI and software right now is about shipping faster and monetizing harder. This project runs the experiment in the other direction.
I use the same AI-assisted development workflow that's reshaping the industry — but I point it at saving people money instead of extracting it. Every app I release replaces a subscription with a free alternative, built well enough to actually use.
This is a hobby, not a business. I don't earn anything from NeuraTiM — if anything, it costs me. What scales instead is the number of free apps I can put into the world.
You've learned that “free” usually means you're the product, and that skepticism is healthy — keep it. Instead of asking for your trust, here are the four ways free apps usually earn their money back, and how to verify that none of them is happening here:
There is no ad network in any of these apps. No banner, no video between actions, no “remove ads” purchase — there are no ads to remove.
Use any app as long as you like: no ad will ever appear, and the store listing itself declares none.
No account, no sign-up, no analytics, no tracking. Everything you do stays on your device — nothing is collected, so there is nothing to sell.
Turn on airplane mode. The apps keep working, completely — software that phones nothing home doesn't miss the connection.
The free version is not a teaser for a paid one. No premium tier, no locked feature, no trial that expires — what you install is everything there is.
Open the store listing: no in-app purchases. That declaration is enforced by the stores, not just promised by me.
The only money in this entire project is the tip jar on this page. It is optional, it unlocks nothing, and no app will ever ask you for it.
Try to find a payment button inside any app. There isn't one.
So what do I get out of it? A hobby I genuinely enjoy, proof that useful software can simply be free, and the occasional tip from someone who wanted to say thanks. That is the entire business model — and if it ever changed, this page is where it would have to say so.
How these apps are made
“An AI wrote it” is half a sentence. Here is the other half — four acts of what actually happens between the first prompt and a release that works on someone else's phone.
Act I · The briefNobody types “build me an app” and walks away. Every feature starts as a long, exact brief: the states, the edge cases, the data rules, the tests it has to pass, the things it must never do. AI writes code — it does not make the decisions. A vague prompt buys a vague app, and I pay for that later in rewrites.
Act II · The reviewWhat comes back is a draft, never a delivery. I read the diff, run it, click through the app, and send it back with what is wrong. Then again. When one model keeps missing the point, the same task goes to a different one — and yes, some rounds end with me telling a machine in plain words that this is not what I asked for.
Act III · The field testThen the part no model can do for me. iPhone and Android, phone and tablet, the web build, the browser on a phone, portrait and landscape. Release pipelines wired up on GitHub, signing keys, Play Console and App Store Connect filled in, the presentation site checked, every feature tried by hand before anyone else sees it.
Act IV · The reckoningThis is the honest arithmetic. Writing the code went from a month to a few hours — that part is real, and it is why these apps exist at all. Testing, releasing and keeping them correct did not get faster by a single minute, and that is where the time goes now. AI moved the bottleneck. It did not remove it.
Built with AI. Read, argued with, corrected, tested on real devices and shipped by a human — that half has no shortcut.
Releasing free apps doesn't mean releasing them for nothing. Three real costs sit behind every app I ship:
$99/year, required just to put an app on the App Store — regardless of price.
This website, and the infrastructure behind every release, has to live somewhere.
Building fast and well requires access to advanced AI models — and those aren't free either.
I cover all of it myself. If one of these apps saved you a subscription you were about to pay for, a tip helps keep the program running — nothing more, nothing less. It goes toward exactly these three things.
Other ways to say thanks:
Prefer email? Send a Tip
Every app here is free on every platform it supports.
A fast, no-frills checklist app for packing lists and reminders.
A one-screen repeating timer for stretch breaks, eye rests and hourly reminders.
A decompression laboratory for divers.
See your day, one block at a time.
Account-free, local-first shared expenses.
So far my best app — notes, handwriting, imported PDFs and spreadsheets, all on storage you control.
A private, offline image editor — crop, adjust, effects and export without uploading a picture.
Everything with a date, in one calm place.
Design the form. Keep the record.
What you have, how many, and where you put it — with a shopping list that fills itself.
Everything you own, on your own device.
Pick your clips and get a first cut in one tap — then change every join, second and colour.
More apps in progress — check back soon.
If there's a paid app out there — simple enough that it could realistically be rebuilt in a few hours — send it my way. I'll take a look, and if it's a good fit, I'll build a free alternative (and try to make it a little better) under the NeuraTiM profile.
