DingBit is Live: A Pavlovian Habit App

I built this for myself first.

During the workday, I’d catch myself hunched over my desk, my whole body tense, three hours into a session without a sip of water. I knew the habit I wanted, but knowing never translated into doing. So, I tried a bit of Pavlovian conditioning on myself.

The idea was simple. Pick a chime, fire it every 30 minutes, do the thing when it plays. After enough reps the sound itself becomes the trigger.

That's DingBit. As of this week, it's on the App Store.

What it actually does

You schedule a "ding" for a small action: relax your shoulders, take a breath, drink water, stretch. You set the interval and pick the sound. The app fires a notification at that cadence whether it's open or not, on iPhone or Apple Watch.

While building it I noticed something useful: the Apple Watch supports up to 8 distinct haptic patterns. So I gave each habit its own. Shoulders got one pulse. Water got something different enough that I'd never confuse them. After a couple of weeks my wrist started telling me what to do without me looking at anything, which was sort of the whole point.

The haptic is discreet enough to survive meetings. The chime is optional per habit, and you can mix them however you want.

What's in the box

• Recurring reminders at custom intervals
• Apple Watch companion with equal priority. Complete from the wrist and it syncs to the phone instantly
• Per-habit sounds and haptic patterns, so each cue feels different
• Interactive notification actions: "Done" or "Snooze 5 min" without unlocking
• Streak tracking and a calendar heatmap, to see if the conditioning is actually taking
• Local-first: no accounts, no cloud, no analytics, nothing leaving the phone

The pricing

It's free. Three habits on the free tier covers most people's starting point. If you want unlimited habits and a few aesthetic options there's a supporter tier, but nothing behind it is required to use the app.

I made it freemium mostly as a "if this helped you, buy me a coffee" thing. Not as a growth funnel.

Why no cloud

I built DingBit with SwiftData for local storage and WatchConnectivity for phone-watch sync. Everything stays on device to guarantee privacy.

How it's going for me

It's working. I catch myself relaxing my jaw a few seconds after certain chimes now. Water intake is up. Whether any of that lasts long-term is its own experiment, but the short-term behavior change has been real.

Try it

DingBit is on the App Store, free, universal (iPhone + Apple Watch). It lives at dingbit.app.

If you try it, let me know what you think. Critical feedback especially — that's the whole reason I ship small things like this in the open.