The 1% App: How Two Teenagers Replaced 6 Fitness Apps With One

We got tired of paying for six different apps that never talked to each other. One for workouts, one for food, one for habits, and many more apps for everything else. So we decided to built one app that replaces all of them, at a fraction of the cost. Here’s a quick look at what we made:

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You’ve already tried to fix this. It didn’t work.

Be honest with yourself for a second. How many self-improvement apps are currently sitting on your phone, half-used, still billing you?

A workout tracker you open twice a week. A calorie counter you abandoned because logging food in three different places felt like a part-time job. A habit app from January that hasn’t seen a tap since February. A meditation app you forgot you were even subscribed to until it showed up on your bank statement. Maybe a separate GPS app just for runs, because none of the others bothered to build one properly.

Add it up. $9.99 here. $12.99 there. $4.99 for the one that just sends you a guilt-trip notification you swipe away without reading. Most people chasing a better version of themselves end up paying somewhere between $45 and $65 a month — spread across five or six apps that don’t talk to each other, don’t share data, and were never designed with the obvious truth that fitness, food, focus, sleep, and mindset are all connected. They’re not separate categories of your life. They’re one life.

What you need is a single place that correctly connects all of your data integrating it with one another to help produce the most perfect profile and plan for you to actually help you improve. It should be designed to work for you and you only because everyone has different needs and you deserve an app that can actually respond to them, whilst also simultaneously not stealing any of your data because that belongs to you and you only.

We know, because we were those people. Two teenagers, five subscriptions, zero results that stuck. So we deleted all of it and built the app we actually wanted instead and people we knew were begging to use it.

One equation explains the whole app

Here’s the math we built a company around:

1.01³⁶⁵ = 37.78

Improve by just 1% every day, and by the end of the year you’re not 365% better. You’re 37 times better. That’s compounding — the same force that turns small savings into real wealth, applied to your body and your habits instead of your bank account.

Now the part nobody puts on a motivational poster: 0.99³⁶⁵ ≈ 0.03. Get 1% worse each day — skip the session, eat a bit worse, hit snooze on the thing you said you’d do — and by December you’re left with almost nothing. Not a dramatic collapse. Just quiet erosion, one day at a time.

That’s it. That’s the whole philosophy. Not 75-day extreme challenges. Not “no days off.” Just relentless, boring, compounding 1% — in the one place actually built to track all of it at once, instead of scattering it across a graveyard of half-used apps.

What you get instead of six apps

We didn’t want to build “a fitness app with extra features bolted on.” We wanted to build the one place where all of it lives, because that’s how real life actually works. Here’s everything that’s included — all fifteen+ tools, one flat price, nothing locked behind a second paywall once you’re already paying:

• Workout Tracker — 1,000+ exercises, GIFs and how-to guides, custom routines, rest timers, automatic personal-best tracking, and syncing to Apple Health
• Nutrition Tracker — 3 million+ foods, barcode scanning, personalised macro targets, and water logging
• Running Tracker — GPS route recording, mile-by-mile pace splits, elevation, heart rate, and 5K/10K personal bests, fully offline
• Habit Tracker — unlimited habits, streaks, calendar heatmaps, and completion stats
• Focus Timer — Pomodoro-based deep work sessions with app-blocking built in
• Journal — a private, unstructured writing space stored only on your device, never on our servers
• Bodyweight Logger — trend-based weight tracking with smart scale support
• Progress Tracker — historical strength graphs so you can actually see the compounding happen
• Health Stats — weekly overviews of heart rate, steps, sleep, and activity via Apple HealthKit
• Meditations — short, breathing-based sessions built to fit between sets, not replace your day
• Mini-Books — condensed summaries of fitness, mindset, nutrition, and productivity books, readable in 10–15 minutes
• Daily Quotes — a new one every day, from a library of 2,500+
• Weight Calculator — BMI, ideal bodyweight, and macro targets from your own stats
• AI System — an in-app assistant that’s context-aware of your actual training, nutrition, and habits, with coaching insights that now appear during workouts themselves
• Social & Friends — private by default, with the option to compare progress and share workouts with people you actually know

Fifteen tools most people are currently paying for separately. One app. One price. That alone is usually the moment people decide to try it.

Two teenagers, no investors, no university — just a bedroom and a problem worth solving

Here’s the part that tends to surprise people: The 1% wasn’t built by a startup with a boardroom and a Series A. It was built by two guys who turned down university to do it.

Daniel Cleave, our co-founder handling development and product, has been in the gym since he was 15. He studied maths and physics turning down university to build this full time, and wrote the entire codebase — including a custom-built food database — from his bedroom with no outside help, influence or funding.

Mariusz Bennett, our co-founder handling marketing and growth, studied PE, psychology, and sports studies, and also turned down university to focus on this. His background in psychology shapes how we think about behavior change and why people actually stick with (or abandon) habits.

No investors. No outside funding. No team of fifty. Just two people who believed the current model — five apps, five subscriptions, zero integration — was broken, and who happened to know how to fix it.

The thing every other app quietly does with your data — we don’t

Most apps in this category build their business model around your data, whether they say so or not. Free food-logging apps sell your eating habits to advertisers. “Free” fitness trackers monetize your workout patterns. We built The 1% around the opposite idea, and it shows in the architecture itself, not just the privacy policy nobody reads.

• The vast majority of your data — workouts, habits, journal entries, nutrition logs, GPS routes, bodyweight — stays on your device
• Your journal is stored locally only. It never touches our servers, and we can’t access it even if we wanted to
• We don’t run analytics or usage tracking. We don’t know which features you personally use
• No ad networks, no third-party tracking SDKs, no device fingerprinting
• If you cancel, your data isn’t held hostage — it stays on your phone
• The only things that ever reach the cloud are your account credentials and any workout data you explicitly choose to share with friends and even this we are working on ways to reduce the data that will leave your phone

This isn’t a compliance checkbox we added after the fact. It’s a decision we made before we wrote a single line of the app. We believe you own the right to all your data an no one else at all, almost software we use for the 1% is produced in-house meaning we have full control on guaranteeing this privacy so that not even we can see your data, all of it stays on-device and is fully processed there. It means occasionally you will need to wait a few seconds longer to see your data or for self-improvement plans to form or AI’s to respond but is worth it for the value of your privacy. We’ve even gone so far to make it so that all AI data and chats remains on-device too.

The part where we tell you what it costs (spoiler: less than your coffee habit)

• $4.99/month (£4.99 in the UK)
• £55/year — about 10% cheaper than paying monthly
• A 7-day free trial, full access to everything, no card required upfront
• No tiers. No “premium” unlock hiding behind a second paywall. No in-app purchases. Every single feature above is available from day one, to every user, at that one price

Do the comparison honestly: if you’re currently paying for a workout app, a food tracker, a habit app, and a meditation app separately, you are almost certainly spending more than $4.99 a month right now — for four disconnected apps instead of one that actually talks to itself.

How to start without burning out in week one

Here’s the mistake almost everyone makes with an app like this — the same mistake people make with self-improvement in general: they try to do all of it on day one. Fifteen features, all switched on, all at once. Three days later it feels like a chore and the app gets deleted along with the other five.

Don’t do that. Pick one thing.

• If you’re already training, start with the Workout Tracker
• If you’re trying to build a new routine from scratch, start with the Habit Tracker

A simple first week looks like this:

• Monday — Set up your profile, connect Apple Health, turn on notifications
• Tuesday — Log your first workout
• Wednesday — Add two or three habits, not ten
• Thursday — Light activity, active rest
• Friday — Log a full day of food
• Saturday — Second workout
• Sunday — Journal for five minutes

Layer in Running, Meditations, and Focus Timer in week two, once the basics are actually sticking. The compounding only works if you keep showing up. 1% doesn’t ask you to be perfect. It just asks you to not quit.

Where this is heading (and why getting in now actually matters)

This is still early. We’re actively building:

• A standalone Apple Watch app that doesn’t need your iPhone nearby
• Sessions — HIIT, yoga, Pilates, and virtual training built into the app
• Expanded social sharing for nutrition, habits, and running routes
• Meal planning and recipes
• A coaching platform connecting users with certified professionals
• CSV data export
• Live challenges between friends
• Android, once the iOS foundation is where we want it

Feature requests aren’t a black hole here — we personally read every one submitted through our public portal, and a meaningful chunk of what’s already in the app exists because a user asked for it. You’re not joining a finished product built by a faceless company. You’re joining early, while it’s still small enough that your feedback actually changes what gets built next.

Your six subscriptions vs. one decision

Let’s bring this back to where we started. You already have the apps. You already have the subscriptions. You already know, deep down, that none of them are actually working together, and that half of them haven’t been opened in weeks.

The 1% isn’t asking you to add a seventh app to that pile. It’s asking you to replace the pile with one thing that costs less than what you’re already paying, keeps your data on your own device, and was built by people who use it every single day because they built it for themselves first.

The 1% is available now on the App Store for iPhone (iOS 18+) — 7-day free trial, full access, no card required to start.

👉 Get it and start your trial: The 1%

Still not sure? Visit our webpage first: theonepercent.app

Something broken, missing, or could be better? Tell us directly — support@theonepercent.app or bug@theonepercent.app. We’re two people who use this app every day. We’d genuinely like to know.

Small daily improvements lead to extraordinary results. That’s not a slogan. That’s just what 1.01, repeated 365 times, actually does. The only question left is whether day one starts today or six months from now.