April 2020. I couldn't find an app to remind me to look around, so at least I drew what I saw when I remembered on my own.
The reminder app that didn't exist
In 2020, locked at home like everyone else, I signed up for a transformational training. Online, of course. That year we all learned things online that we never had time for before.
One week, the exercise was this: once an hour, wherever you are, stop. Look around. Find one thing that is beautiful, or interesting, or simply pleases you. Take a photo of it.
Simple. Lovely, even. All I needed was a reminder every hour.
An hour is apparently too much to ask
I opened the app store with modest expectations. A reminder that fires every hour during the day, for a week. How hard can it be?
Harder than I thought. Alarm apps wanted me to create twelve separate alarms. Reminder apps could do "every day at 9:00" but not "every hour from morning to evening". The apps that came close were buried in ads, or locked the one feature I needed behind a subscription, or looked like they were last updated when Ptolemy was still right about the planets.
I did the exercise anyway, with twelve alarms and mild irritation. The photos were nice. That week I also started sketching the streets I missed, just to keep my hands busy. The habit of noticing stayed. The tooling question stayed too: how does this app not exist?
Five years later, still nothing
When I started Almagesta and asked myself which product comes first, there was no real debate.
Before writing a line of code I did the research properly this time: found every competitor I could, installed them, walked through each one screen by screen. Repeat reminders, interval timers, hourly chimes, the whole shelf.
The picture in 2025 was the same as in 2020. Apps that do intervals but not time windows. Apps that do windows but drown you in ads. Apps that charge a monthly subscription for what is, at heart, a very simple promise: remind me every N minutes, between this hour and that hour, and don't stop until I've heard you.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A reminder you can ignore is a reminder that doesn't work. Half the apps I tested would fire once, quietly, and consider the job done. My phone reminds me about apps I never open, but couldn't nag me to drink water.
So I built Pingo
Pingo does one thing: recurring reminders, exactly the way you want them.
A window pattern: every 45 minutes from 8:00 to 20:00. A times pattern: 7:00, 12:00, 18:00. Day filters: weekdays only. And the setting I wanted most, "repeat if not acknowledged": if you don't respond, Pingo asks again. And again. Until you actually do the thing.
The exact reminder from 2020, finally possible. Setup took under thirty seconds.
No account. No cloud. No subscription. Your reminders live on your phone, and the app costs $4.99 once, which is less than the monthly price of most of its competitors.
If in 2020 there had been an app like this, I would have paid for it in a heartbeat, taken my hourly photos, and never thought about it again. It didn't exist, so five years later I built it.
The hourly-beauty exercise, by the way, I can finally recommend properly. Now there's an app for it.