Most apps start with a sign-up screen. Embera starts with a few quick questions about your treatment, and no email field. That was one of the first decisions in the project, made before the design.
The reason: health data is personal
A GLP-1 log is not a to-do list. It holds your medication, doses, weight, side effects, sometimes your cycle and progress photos. If that sits on a company’s server tied to your email, you have to trust that company with it for as long as it exists, and whoever buys it next.
The simplest way to protect that data is to never hold it. So Embera has:
- No account, no login. You open the app and start logging.
- No server with your logs. Everything is stored on your iPhone, and synced through your own private iCloud if you use it.
- No ads.
- Export any time, free. A CSV of everything you logged, even if you never pay.
The app does send anonymous usage signals, like “onboarding step 5 reached”, so I can see where people get stuck. They never contain health data. That is written in the privacy policy.
The second reason: trust
While researching the category, one thing came up again and again in GLP-1 communities: people felt burned when an app they had logged in for months suddenly put features behind a paywall. Once your history is inside an app, leaving is hard, and that is exactly when a surprise hurts most.
So alongside “no account”, Embera makes two promises:
- The free features stay free. Dose log, site rotation, medication level, weight, reminders, check-ins, widget and export, with no time limit.
- Your price is locked. Shown in the paywall: if you subscribe to Embera Pro, the price you pay does not go up while you stay subscribed.
What it costs
No account is not free of trade-offs, and it is fair to be clear about them:
- iPhone only. iCloud sync works because Embera is an Apple-only app. No Android version for now.
- No web version. There is no server to log into.
- I cannot recover your data. If you turn iCloud off and lose your phone, your logs go with it. That is why the CSV export exists.
- No “compare with other users”. Without a server, there is no pool of other people’s data, and that is fine by me.
What it means for the app
Everything is calculated on your iPhone: your estimated medication level, your food noise patterns, the cycle view, your run-out date. No AI service, no cloud processing. The only outside lookup is a barcode scan in the nutrition log, which asks the free Open Food Facts database about the product you scanned.
If you have questions about any of this, write to me. I read every email.