Meet Shadowkit: money, habits and reminders in one offline app

Most of us run our days on a handful of small apps: one for spending, one for habits, one for reminders, maybe a tally counter and a data monitor. Each wants an account, each sends your data somewhere, and each looks different.

Shadowkit puts those small jobs in one quiet app. It’s built from skills: self-contained tools you add to Home when you need them and remove when you don’t.

The ten skills

Money. Log expenses, income and transfers between your accounts in a few taps. Create your own currencies with your own exchange rates, sort spending into categories, add tags, and see a chart of where it went this week, month or year. You can also import your bank’s CSV statement with a step-by-step mapper. There’s more on that in how to track your spending without linking your bank.

Habit. Track habits you do every day, on specific days, or a few times a week. A habit can be a simple check or a count, like 8 glasses of water, and each has its own colour. You can skip a day on purpose without losing your streak. We explain how in habit streaks that don’t punish a day off.

Notify. Reminders that read like a sentence: “Weekdays at 11:00” or “Every 2 hours, 09:00–21:00”. Each one shows the next times it will go off, so you never wonder whether you set it right. See reminders in plain words.

Counter. Count anything with one tap: cups of coffee, laps, pages, people at the door. A counter can reset itself daily, weekly or monthly and keeps the past periods as history. Its page on Home shows every counter as a tile with its own minus and plus, so a count is one tap.

Notes. Quick text notes and checklists. Pin the ones you need to the top, tick checklist items off right on the page, search across all of them, and share a note as plain text.

Journal. A few lines about your day, with a mood if you like: five faces from awful to great. Write as often as you want. A calendar shows the days you wrote and how each one felt, and a count of days in a row keeps you going.

Events. The dates ahead, counting down: birthdays, trips, appointments, anniversaries. An event happens once or every year, can show the age someone turns or which anniversary it is, and can remind you a week, a day or a couple of hours before. More in a countdown app for birthdays and trips.

Capsule. Letters to your future self. Write one and keep it as a draft, or seal it until a day you choose, from a month to years away. Until then, not a word of it shows; on the morning it opens, you get a notification. See how to write a letter to your future self.

Split. Work out a bill and its tip: evenly, by who had what, or by shares, with every share adding up to the penny. Save a split to tick people off as they pay you back, and share it with the group as plain text. See how to split a bill and the tip fairly.

Data (Android only). Live download and upload speed, today’s usage split between mobile and Wi-Fi, and 90 days of history. If you like, it sits in your status bar. Read more in how to check your mobile data usage on Android.

Home: every skill a swipe away

Home is a row of pages. Today comes first: a greeting, your gems, and one line per skill with where it stands, such as “£42.60 spent today” or “3 of 5 done today”. Swipe, or tap a skill’s name in the rail along the top, and you’re on that skill’s own page, where it does everything: log a purchase, tick a habit, add to a counter. To change the order, long-press a name in the rail and drag it. The + at the end of the rail adds a skill, and you can take one off Home at any time. Its data waits for you, so adding it back brings everything back.

Profiles keep things apart

A profile is a separate space with its own skills and data: Personal, Work, Family. Switching takes one tap, and nothing crosses between them. A work expense never shows up in your personal spending, and a family counter doesn’t clutter your own Home.

No account, and it works offline

There’s nothing to sign up for. You open the app and start. Everything you enter is stored on your phone, and every skill works without a connection. On a plane, underground or abroad without roaming, nothing changes.

That’s a design choice, not a missing feature. Your spending, habits and reminders are personal, and there’s no reason they need to live on someone else’s server. We wrote about it in why Shadowkit has no account.

Free, with Pro when you want more

Shadowkit is free to use. The free version includes every skill, all the themes, bank CSV import and JSON backups. It has a few limits, such as 5 habits, 5 counters, 3 reminders, 20 notes, 30 journal entries, 5 upcoming events, 3 sealed letters and 3 open splits in one profile. Shadowkit Pro raises those limits and adds more profiles, tags, CSV and PDF export of your money, and the full 90 days of Data history. On Android, each skill has one free home-screen widget and Pro unlocks the rest.

If Pro ever lapses, nothing is deleted. You keep everything you made; only adding past the free limits stops, and the Pro widgets wait until it’s back.

What’s next

More skills are on the way. If there’s one you’d like to see, write to us. The address is on the contact page.