ProvatoExplore the appI kept a running note on my phone titled "places to try." It grew for a year, then I stopped opening it, because it only ever grew. Nothing on it ever became a memory of what I did. When I finally went to one of those places, the visit lived somewhere else entirely: a text to a friend, a photo buried in Camera Roll, a star rating I gave once on a review app and never looked at again. Nothing connected the plan to the experience. That gap is why I built Provato.
The problem with social feed apps
Apps like Beli and Yelp solve a real problem (discovering somewhere new) by making everything social. You see what your friends ate, you rank restaurants against each other, your activity shows up on a feed. That's useful for discovery, but it's the wrong shape for a personal record. I don't want my fourth visit to a coffee shop I already love to compete for attention with someone else's brand-new restaurant find. I want a private timeline: this place, these five visits, this is how my opinion of it changed.
Provato has no feed. There's no ranking against friends, no public profile, no pressure to log something the moment you experience it so it "counts." It's built around one idea: log a real try, and let the app build the history around it. A restaurant, a coffee shop, a product, an event, a class (anything you might reasonably revisit) gets its own timeline. Every visit is its own log, with its own rating, note, date, price, and photos, so the second and fifth visit don't overwrite the first. You end up with something closer to a diary than a leaderboard.
Why one-time purchase, not a subscription
Most tracking apps in this category (food logs, habit trackers, list-keeping apps) have converged on subscriptions, often for something that's pretty simple under the hood: store some structured data, show it back to you, sync it across devices. I didn't want Provato to feel like another monthly line item for something this basic. The free plan supports up to five items, enough to try the app with real data. Provato Plus removes that limit for a one-time purchase: no recurring billing, no feature that unlocks now and gets pulled behind a paywall later.
It also shapes what I build. A one-time purchase lets me focus on maintaining a useful personal record instead of adding social features or engagement tricks to justify a monthly price.
Local-first instead of a cloud backend
Provato doesn't require an account. Your data lives on your device first, and syncs through iCloud when it's available: the same private iCloud container tied to your Apple ID, not a Provato-hosted backend. It's partly a privacy choice, but it's also about what happens when things go wrong. If a backend goes down, or a company shuts down a product, cloud-dependent list apps go read-only or disappear entirely. A local-first app with optional iCloud sync keeps working as long as your phone does, and you can always export a JSON backup from Settings if you want a copy outside the app.
It also means there's no server sitting on a copy of everywhere you've been, every product you've bought, or every event you've attended, waiting to be repurposed, sold, or breached. Provato has no ad SDKs or third-party analytics, and your logs are never used for advertising or profiling.
What changed for me
The habit that stuck wasn't some elaborate categorization system: it was logging one real thing after it happened, with a rating and a note, in under thirty seconds. Wishlist items graduate into tried items with real history instead of staying stuck as a static list. Six months in, I can search "ramen," see every ramen place I've logged, sorted by rating, with notes on which dish was worth ordering again. A notes app or a generic list app never gave me that. What I have now is a searchable record, connected across every repeat visit, built from what actually happened each time I went back, rather than a plan that quietly went nowhere.