How can an app be free?
Modern web apps with minimal traffic really don’t require much infrastructure. As Kohlrabi scales, its costs will go up, but I expect to be able to cover all of this through donations.
Fundamentally, it does not make sense to charge for an app that brings me fulfillment to create. I made this for me, and I think others may enjoy it too.
Kohlrabi uses several open source projects without a commercial license. I make sure to credit these here, and I take the appropriate attribution seriously.
And because of those open source projects, Kohlrabi also HAS to be free. It would be a violation of those terms to charge for this app.
Additionally, it’s incredibly easy to make an app like this these days. The actual coding was trivial with AI tools. I expect the app to be copied in a matter of weeks or months, and that’s totally fine.
I plan to extend Kohlrabi to have food tracking and a personal training dashboard eventually as well. Also for free. Tools like this should be very accessible, and I like that I am contributing to that ideal.
The actual high costs of the app come from the time I put into refining and testing it. Before rolling Kohlrabi out for a public beta, I went through nearly 600 GitHub issues and reviewed literature extensively. All of that is before actual users have started to use it.
If you want to support the development of Kohlrabi, please feel free to donate. Another way to support the app is by sharing it around, or by reporting bugs you find (or confusing user interface choices!). But if you also just want a free workout tracker and don’t want to contribute in any way, that’s totally fine!
Give it a whirl, see what you think. You can try an example workout here: https://kohlrabi.us/s/bE41kVbw
Kohlrabi is a free workout tracker and it will remain free forever. If infrastructure costs grow to an unsustainable amount without contributions to cover those costs, I will simply publish the entire source code as an open source repository that anyone can use.
You may be thinking: “will there ever be ads?”
Here’s my definite answer: NO!!!
What about marketing emails? Is there a plan to monetize on that? No! That would actually cost me money to do, and would be a violation of my privacy policy.
The app is wired to EmailOctopus to allow me to send app updates. But signing up for Kohlrabi is completely optional, and it is very easy to opt out of marketing emails (and very easy to delete your account and any provided info as well).
Ironically, I find that “free workout app!! It’s free!!” may actually be turning people off of Kohlrabi. Like, what’s the catch?
The catch is I’d love if people tried out the thing I made :)
Hopefully my reasoning in this article can help address that.
Cheers and happy lifting!