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Calvi

A diary that does not lecture

Most food apps either reduce everything to a calorie count or leave you feeling guilty. Calvi is the third option: it logs for you, counts honestly and stays quiet when all is well.

Who makes it

Calvi is made by one person: Mykhailo Nahreba, an independent developer. No studio, no investors and no department inventing "retention features". Decisions here take a day, not a quarter, and every one of them has someone to answer for it.

The app reached Google Play in September 2026 and the App Store days later, and the interface speaks thirteen languages. It is a young product, and it grows from what the people using it write in.

Where this came from

Calvi began with a plain annoyance. To log an ordinary home-cooked lunch you had to find it in a database where it was either missing or named in someone else words, and then weigh it too. A week of that and everyone gives up: not out of laziness, but because logging lunch takes longer than eating it.

So an entry in Calvi is one sentence, the way you would say it to a person: "a bowl of borscht and bread". Nora finds the dish, takes your usual portion and splits the day across meals. Photo, barcode, ingredients label, voice: every road leads to the one field at the bottom of the screen, and none of them goes through a catalogue.

And the numbers stay honest. Our own layer of home-cooked dishes, an open barcode database for packaged food, and an assistant that only counts what it is allowed to count. The daily target, the allergens and the tokens are worked out by ordinary code covered with tests. That is not an implementation detail but a promise.

The rules we keep

  • No shame

    A missed day is a missed day, not a failure. The app does not paint it red and does not tell you that you slipped. In the evening it asks only about what is missing, and stays quiet if everything is there.

  • Every number has an origin

    Each figure can say where it came from: the packaging, the reference, or an estimate. An estimate calls itself an estimate, and one sentence corrects it.

  • Your kitchen, not someone else database

    A home-cooked dish should not be an oddity you type in by hand. The reference grows from what people actually eat: borscht, pilaf, syrnyky, not only the shelves of one supermarket.

  • Faster than eating it

    If logging takes more than twenty seconds, the diary is dead. All of the work goes against those seconds: voice, photo, usual portions, Nora remembering.

  • Photos are never stored

    A shot of the plate lives exactly as long as the analysis takes and never reaches the database. What stays in the diary is the name, the weight and the numbers.

  • No ads

    The app earns from the subscription and from nothing else. Your entries are not sold and not shown to advertisers, and the free diary stays free.

Write to us

A bug, an idea, or a dish the reference is missing: all of it is read and answered by the same person who writes the code.

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