About Multi
Multi is built on a single idea: a task, a habit and an expense are not three different things. They are one thing, described three different ways.
The same thing, three times over
Look at what a to-do app stores. A title, a date, and whether it’s done. Now look at a habit tracker: a title, a date, whether it’s done — and a rule that says it comes back. And a spending app: a title, a date, and an amount.
That is not three data models. It is one, with two optional fields. Attach a repeat rule and the item becomes a habit. Attach an amount and it becomes an expense. Attach both and you have a recurring expense — the rent, the gym membership, the coffee you buy every morning without ever deciding to.
The cost of pretending otherwise is that most people end up running three apps that each know about a third of their life. “Buy a birthday present” is a task on Monday and an expense on Tuesday, and the two never meet. Multi takes the model seriously instead: one model, one list, one history, one set of totals.
One control instead of three screens
Having a unified model is only useful if it doesn’t come with a unified form full of switches. So the app has one control, and the control is a line.
Drag the line up and it bends into a wave — the item repeats, it is a habit, and dragging further up makes it more frequent. Drag it down and it splits into two parallel lines while an amount field slides in — the item carries money, it is an expense. Let go near the middle and it settles flat again: a plain task.
Inside the app that control is called the LineSculptor, and the same three shapes are used everywhere afterwards. In the list, a flat line means a task, a wave means a habit, a doubled line means an expense. You learn the vocabulary once, in about three seconds, by dragging something. Then you can read the whole app without labels. You can try the add flow for yourself in the app screen on the home page.
How it’s built
Multi runs on your device. Your items live in a local database on the iPhone, and there is no Multi server behind them and no account to create. iCloud sync exists so your list can follow you between your own devices, but it is off until you turn it on, and when you do, it goes through your own private iCloud rather than through us.
The parts that would normally be an excuse to send data somewhere are done locally too. Speak a few items at once and the speech recognition and the model that interprets it both run on the phone. Scan a receipt and the text is read on the phone. There is no analytics, no tracking and no third-party SDK in the app — not as a marketing posture, but because a personal list of what you did and what you spent is not the sort of thing that should be leaving your pocket. The privacy policy spells out exactly what that means.
Drawn, not decorated
The look of the app follows from the same idea. Every mark is drawn as a stroke rather than borrowed from an icon set: monoline, near-black on off-white, generous whitespace, no gradients and no drop shadows. That is a deliberate choice. A list you open a dozen times a day should stay quiet and let its own content carry the meaning, and the line grammar only reads clearly when nothing else on the screen competes with it.
Eight accent themes ship with the app, each with a matching Home Screen icon, because people like to make an app theirs. Amber is the default, and it is the colour of this site.
Get in touch
Multi is coming soon to the App Store. If you want to know when it ships, or you want to argue about the data model, write to hello@getmulti.app.