It started with a whiteboard in the kitchen.
I have fibromyalgia — chronic pain and fatigue that doesn't follow a schedule and doesn't respond to "just push through it." My capacity varies day to day in ways that are hard to predict and harder to explain. So I'd been using a whiteboard to keep track of things visually: tasks for the day, things my wife needed from me while she was out at work, stuff I was trying not to let fall through the gaps.
The problem was that I had to be in the kitchen to see it. And if I wasn't in the kitchen, I'd forget the whiteboard existed. And then the tasks wouldn't get done. And because a lot of those tasks were things I was trying to do to take some of the burden off my wife while she was working full time and I wasn't — when they didn't happen, it created more strain than it relieved.
I needed something that would come to me, not the other way around.
Why I didn't just use an existing app
I looked. There are a lot of productivity apps, and some of them are genuinely good. But they're mostly built for people who show up the same way every day — people for whom "just block out your time and stick to the schedule" is useful advice rather than a description of a life they don't have.
The ones with more nuance were expensive. We're talking £20, £30, sometimes more per month, for features that might help if I stuck with them long enough to find out. I'm on disability benefits. That kind of outlay, on something that might not even work for how my brain and body actually function, wasn't something I could justify — and I knew I wasn't the only person in that position. A lot of people with chronic illness or similar conditions aren't in high-earning jobs. That's not a coincidence; it's a direct consequence of the thing the app is supposed to help with.
So I built my own.
The AuDHD bit
I should be honest that my AuDHD isn't formally diagnosed — it's something I arrived at gradually, partly from reading and recognising myself in it, and partly from the slightly unsettling experience of meeting people for the first time who worked with autistic individuals or had family members on the spectrum, and who quietly clocked something in how I communicate before I'd mentioned anything. That's a specific kind of confirmation.
It matters because it's another layer of variable capacity on top of the fibromyalgia — different in character, but with the same basic effect: the amount I can do, and how well I can do it, shifts in ways that a fixed daily schedule doesn't account for.
What I actually wanted to build
Something that asked "what do you actually have today?" before deciding what to put in your day. That treated low capacity as information to plan around, not a failure state to push through. That sent reminders to wherever I was rather than assuming I'd remember to check a list. That didn't lock every useful feature behind a subscription that assumed the person using it had disposable income.
The core features in Cadence are free because they need to be free to be useful to the people they're designed for. The Pro tier exists to keep the lights on, not to hold the app hostage.
Why it's just me
One developer. No team, no investors, no growth targets attached to someone else's money. There are real limitations to that and I run into them regularly.
But it also means the decisions about what to build aren't being made by people who don't live this. The privacy approach, the tone of the notifications, the fact that pain level is a first-class option alongside energy and focus — those came from actually needing them, not from a feature matrix.
There's a version of this app that a wellness startup would build. This isn't it.
If it helps, I'm glad. If something's wrong or missing, the feedback button in the app comes straight to me — no support ticket queue, no bot. Just me, reading it.