Nomie Alternative: Where to Go Now That Nomie Is Gone

Nomie went dark on February 1, 2023. If you are still looking for a Nomie alternative three years on, it is probably because nothing has quite taken its place, and whatever you settled for in the meantime has started to grate.

The pitch was unusually clear for a tracking app. Track your life activities, locations, feelings, people, and more, all just by tapping a button. A private daily journal for short attention spans, as the site put it. You made a button for whatever you cared about and you tapped it, and the app got out of the way. Nothing to declare in advance, no streak sitting there waiting to be broken.

What Actually Happened to Nomie

The shutdown notice was blunt about the reason. Nomie 4, 5 and 6 all stopped working on February 1, 2023, and users were told to export their data before that date. The money never worked. Revenue did not cover what it cost to keep running, so Brandon Corbin turned it off.

The code then went to GitHub under an open license, and a community fork has kept it building since. That sounds like a happy ending and mostly is not one, for a reason worth stating precisely: open source is not the same as available. What sits on GitHub is a web app you deploy yourself. Download the build, put it on a server, point a browser at it. There is no App Store listing, no hosted version with a sign-up page. The maintained version of Nomie exists in roughly the sense that a disassembled engine in a garage exists.

Self-Hosting Is a Real Answer for a Small Number of People

If you already run a home server, or you keep a small VPS around for side projects, self-hosted Nomie is worth an afternoon. It is a static build with no backend to babysit, so the deployment is about as painless as this class of thing gets, and what you get at the end is a tracker nobody can switch off on you a second time. That is not a small thing to want.

For everybody else the accounting is less kind. You are taking on operations work in exchange for a phone app: a server bill, a domain to renew, certificates, backups you have to actually test rather than assume, and a browser shortcut that has to survive on your home screen for the next several years. Nomie was a progressive web app even at its peak, which is to say you opened it in Mobile Safari and chose “add to home screen.” That worked well enough. It also never quite felt like the apps sitting next to it on the same screen, and three years of iOS releases have not made that gap smaller.

The people who tell you self-hosting is easy are, almost without exception, people for whom it is easy. That does not make them wrong. It makes them a poor guide if what you actually wanted was to log a walk before you forgot you took one.

What to Look For in a Nomie Alternative

The first thing to check is whether the app will let you record something you never planned to do. Most habit trackers fail here. They ask you to declare your habits at setup and then hand you that same list forever, which slowly converts your log into a record of your intentions instead of your life. You went to a friend’s kid’s birthday party, you sat in a waiting room for two hours, you finally fixed the bike. None of that was on the list in January. Nomie did not care, because there was no list, and any Nomie alternative that makes you predefine your life has already dropped the part you liked. This is what separates apps that hold anything you did in one timeline from apps that hold a checklist.

Speed matters more than the feature comparison suggests. A tracker survives when logging costs two seconds and gets abandoned when it costs thirty, and almost nothing else about the app can rescue it from the wrong side of that line. Nomie’s one-tap buttons were the product. The rest was scaffolding around them.

The test is not how fast the app feels while you are sitting on the couch evaluating it. It is whether you will open it standing in a parking lot with one hand full of groceries, twenty seconds before you get distracted and lose the entry forever. Most apps pass the couch test. Far fewer pass the parking lot, usually because somebody added a mood prompt, a category picker, and a confirmation screen between you and the thing you were trying to write down.

Watch for the game layer too, or ideally its absence. Nomie had no points and no avatar to keep fed. If you liked that, you probably already know how gamified trackers tend to end, usually somewhere around month four when the rewards stop landing and the whole apparatus starts feeling like a second job you assigned yourself.

Then there is the criterion almost nobody applies, and the one Nomie taught by example. Check whether the business model can survive. Nomie did not die of bad design or neglected code. It died because there was no sustainable way to pay for it, which is a more common cause of death than the app graveyard likes to admit. Your tracker is only worth anything if you can still open it in six years, since the whole value sits in accumulated history and history compounds. So asking how a free app makes money is not cynicism. It is due diligence, and “free forever with no visible revenue” is the answer that should make you most nervous, whether the eventual bill arrives as a shutdown notice or as your data quietly becoming the product. That second failure mode is worth understanding in its own right if you are choosing on privacy grounds.

One more, and it is the cheapest to check: can you get your data back out? Nomie users could, which is why so many of them still have the file.

Where Logly Fits

Logly is a simple, private activity tracking app with no gamification, no social feed, and no subscription required to use it. You log what you did and Logly keeps the record.

The overlap with what you liked about Nomie is mostly structural. Logging takes a couple of taps. Nothing counts down at you, nothing turns a flat week into a referendum on your character, and there is nobody watching. The free tier covers logging, a single timeline of everything you have recorded, Apple Health and Google Health Connect sync, and a library of more than 600 activities to log from. Logly Pro costs $24.99 a year, with no monthly plan, and adds custom activities, AI insights and chat, voice logging, location tracking, and deeper stats.

Two honest differences, since you have been burned once already and deserve to see them before you invest. Custom activities are the closest equivalent to Nomie’s make-a-button-for-anything model, and they sit in Pro rather than the free tier, so if building your own trackers was the whole reason you used Nomie, that is a paid feature here. Second, Logly is an online app. Your history lives in your account and syncs there, which is what makes a replaced phone a non-event, and it is also not the nothing-leaves-my-machine arrangement that a certain kind of Nomie refugee is specifically hunting for. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, go self-host the fork. You will be happier than you would be talking yourself into something that violates the one rule you care about.

There is also the plain matter of where it runs. Nomie asked you to install a web page onto your home screen and hope iOS kept treating it like an app, which is a compromise a lot of people made because the alternative was not using Nomie. Logly is a real app on both platforms, which sounds like a low bar until you have spent a couple of years on the other side of it. Anyone who has gone looking for a tracker only to find it stranded on the wrong operating system knows how much of the search is just availability.

What Logly offers against the specific way Nomie ended is the boring part. Somebody pays for the app, which gives the app a reason to still be here next year.

What to Do With the Nomie Data You Exported

Somewhere on an old laptop there is a JSON file you dutifully downloaded in January 2023 and have not opened since. No app is going to import it. Nobody is building that.

You should still open it once and read a month of it, because it is more interesting than you remember and because closing the file is easier after you have. Then start the new log clean.

That costs less than it sounds like it should. Whatever those three years were worth to you was never really sitting in the rows, it was in what you noticed about yourself while collecting them, and you kept that part. Patterns in what you do show up over months rather than years, so a fresh log starts saying useful things back to you sooner than most people expect, which is also the pleasant surprise waiting for anyone who has had to switch trackers for less avoidable reasons than a shutdown notice.

The old export is a keepsake at this point. Nothing wrong with that. It is just not doing any work sitting there, and the walk you take this afternoon is unlogged either way.

Start again at getlogly.app. Free to use, and it will still be running the next time you go looking for it.