After 15 years of lifting and spreadsheets, I built my own workout app

I've been weight training for 15 years and never found an app I actually liked. Free ones - Google Sheets and Apple Notes - were too basic. Paid ones crashed mid-workout, refused to work without Wi-Fi, or hid basic features behind a paywall.

So I built SetSweat, a workout and calorie tracker that works offline and stays out of your way.

I’d wanted to build my own for years. Front-end engineering is my day job, so you’d think it would be easy. It wasn’t. I’d dedicate a weekend to it, not touch it for months, then give up entirely. That cycle repeated for years until I picked it back up properly in November 2025 and finally stuck with it long enough to release it this year.

Once it felt reasonable I took it to the gym and tested it properly. That turned into a lot of notes and a lot of improvements. Eventually I added food tracking. The thing that bothered me most about existing apps was the databases: millions of entries, half of them inaccurate or out of date. Most people regularly track around 200 foods, so I added those by default. You can edit the macros for any of them to match what you actually buy, because the numbers on your chicken breast are probably not the crowd average. For anything else, you can add your own, visible only to you.

The goal is to be useful for people who currently use a spreadsheet or pen and paper, or are just fed up with yet another app that overpromises and underdelivers. I'd love some feedback from folk who feel this resonated with them.