We started Astrea because we couldn’t find a fitness app that didn’t either bill us every month or pretend women’s bodies work the same as men’s.
Both of us have always been into sports, and we’d wanted to build a fitness app for years, but we never had the idea that felt right. That changed after my postpartum recovery. I went looking for something to guide me back, ended up deep in the longevity space, and was honestly shocked how male-dominated it is, and how much people talk about bodies like software that just needs fixing. It reminded me of tech, which is strange to say after spending my whole career in it. And with AI, every product in the space has started to look and feel the same. No real differentiation. So I asked myself: can we just do this differently.
For me, different starts with two things. No subscription, especially in this economy, when subscription fatigue is something most people are feeling. And an approach built around calm instead of higher, faster, further, because that’s genuinely how I think about my own body and my own time. I’m not against AI at all, I use it constantly, it’s often the only way I get anything done between the baby’s naps. But I wanted Astrea’s feel to come from somewhere else. I’ve been going into stores, touching fabrics, smelling products, trying to figure out what a spa actually feels like in the physical world, so the app could carry some of that instead of the usual performance-dashboard energy.
Right now we have the landing page live. Not a single line of app code written yet. I’ve already worked through the math behind the algorithms though, so the foundation is there before the building starts.
We’re going to write the first line of code this weekend, and we’re doing it as part of Shipaton 2026 hackathon — we’d be using RevenueCat (the tool that handles payments inside the app) either way, so the timing lined up. If this ends up helping people feel like fitness content was actually made with them in mind, that’s the whole point. And if it encourages even a few more women to jump into something like a hackathon and build in public, that’s exactly the kind of diversity I’d love to see more of in this space.
What would make you trust a wellness app enough to actually stick with it? Send us your thoughts — or if this sounds like your kind of thing, get the app. We read every message ourselves.
#Shipaton #BuildInPublic
Astrea was built in the open, dev log by dev log — see what shipped, and download it yourself.