A tracker for the two or three things you are trying to keep doing. This page is the product's site, arranged as its own home screen; with JavaScript off it reads top to bottom like any other page.
v1.4 iOS and Android
A pawl is the small arm that sits in a ratchet's teeth and stops the wheel turning back. Pawl tracks the two or three things you are trying to keep doing, and it is built so the count only ever goes one way.
Open it, tap the thing you did, put the phone down. That is the whole interaction, and the rest of this site is here because you asked a question about it.
We built this for ourselves in 2024 and put it on the store when a third person asked for a copy.
Most habit apps grow into life-management platforms with dashboards, streak insurance and a paid tier for graphs. We went the other way. Pawl holds a small number of things and counts them, and every feature request that would add a second screen has been turned down so far.
The name is the part that stops a ratchet slipping. It is a small piece of metal that does one job, which is what we are aiming at.
Each one does its job and stops. Nothing here has a roadmap to become a platform.
Up to five things you are keeping up. Five is the cap and it is not configurable, because the sixth thing is how people stop using trackers.
One tap marks today. Miss a day and the count pauses where it is; it does not reset, and nothing sends you a guilt notification about it.
On the first of the month the last month collapses into a single line of numbers. That line is the only history the app keeps, and it fits on one screen.
A streak is a number of days. It is not a score, a level, or a thing you can buy back.
The one-day allowance is the most argued-about line in the app. It stays because forgetting to record something is not the same as not doing it.
Short, because not much does.
There is no account, so there is no server holding a list of what you are trying to do about your health.
Sync runs through your own iCloud or Google Drive folder, so the file is yours and we never see it. Deleting the app deletes the data, which is worth knowing before you delete the app.
The app is a one-time three dollars. Leave your email and we will send the two store links, once.
Pawl is a fictional product. This page exists to show a theme.
No subscription. The page you are reading is the whole pricing conversation.
$3 once, both platforms
Five things, the month line, CSV export. Every update so far has been free and we intend to keep it that way.
$0 / 30 days
The full app for a month. It does not ask for a card, and at the end it does not delete your counts.
Family sharing is on. Buy it once for the house.
Four pages. These are the two people arrive needing.
One row per day per thing, in the file you chose:
date,thing,done
2026-08-07,walk,1
2026-08-07,strings,1
2026-08-08,walk,1There are two of us, so it is one of us, usually within a day.
Feature requests are welcome and most of them get turned down. If yours is the sixth thing on the wheel, read How it works first and then send it anyway; the argument is how the cap keeps earning its place.