Why we build what we build

We make a strange spread of things. One app helps you eat better; another lets you play a Game Boy Advance game on a plane. There is no obvious line you can draw from one to the next. The thread was never what we build. It is why.

The money part, and why it matters

We run Savvy Labs as a non-profit. Nearly everything we make is free to use, and most of it carries no ads at all — that part matters a great deal to us. It also means we make almost no revenue. A few products have optional upgrades, but only because they cost a fair amount to host; the upgrades are there to try to cover that, not to turn a profit.

Building something that is genuinely free, and genuinely ad-free, only works if there is real passion behind it. That is the cut of it, really. We are motivated to make every one of these, and the theme that runs underneath all of them is the same: we want to help people.

Savvy Chef

Chef was the first, and it is still the most mature thing we have. Eating well has quietly become something only people on a reasonable income can manage, and we are trying to pull that barrier down.

Part of it is staying organised — because who actually has the time, especially with a family. Part of it is waste: not throwing your veg away at the end of every week. But the main reason the app exists is to save you money on the weekly shop. A genuine meal plan means you stop running to the local store for the ingredient you forgot, you stop buying things you do not need, you stop forgetting the things you do, and you stop binning food. It will even suggest meals from what you already have in the cupboard — the soy sauce, the long-life bits at the back. On their own each of these is tiny. Together they add up to an app that saves you money.

SavvyParent

SavvyParent comes from the same place. When you are a new parent, especially of a newborn, you are inundated with media telling you that you can get your child to sleep if you just do the right set of things — the right bedtime routine, more day sleep, less day sleep. So much of it contradicts the rest, and a lot of it is being sold to people who are exhausted and vulnerable.

We wanted to offer something honest instead: genuine, NHS-backed information, given plainly. Because the truth is that, short of neglect, you cannot force a child to sleep — and we would never endorse that. So we give that market the real information, with integrity, free and without ads, for the simple reason that we think it is the right thing to do.

Backlight

Backlight is more selfish, and I will be honest about that. Every time I am on a plane, I want to play Pokémon Fire Red. Without fail. Over the years I have downloaded an emulator to do it, more than once I have paid for one — and more than once I have lost my saves. The last time, it was £7 a month. I played for hours, closed the app, opened it again, and the save was simply gone. Every hour I had put in had vanished with it.

That was enough. So I built my own: no subscription, no cost, no ads. It runs entirely offline, which means it costs me nothing to host, and I will never have a reason to charge for it.

Chorus

Then there is Chorus, which turns the chore rota into a game. If I am honest, a lot of what we make ends up overlapping with the ADHD community — Chorus especially. We think of that as a group worth looking after too. It is a small thing: gamify the chores, make the day a little easier. Sometimes that is enough of a reason.

Why we keep going

We love what we do, and we want to keep doing it — bringing genuine, good products to market and holding on to this free-first, ad-free-first way of working.

Lately one question keeps coming back to me. Now that the barrier to building software is so low, is it even worth making apps any more? The stores are saturated with things that were clearly generated by AI and shipped without a second thought. And honestly, I have landed on the opposite of despair: this is the most important time there has been to keep real products on the market. The average quality is about to fall off a cliff. Those of us who genuinely care about technical excellence need to stay firm — so that, when someone goes looking, the good things are still there to find.