What does FitGlass mean? The story behind the name

August 17, 2026·6 min read·by Nisarg Chaudhary

I can’t start building something until I know what it’s called. I know that’s mostly procrastination. But naming a thing forces me to decide what it really is, and until I’ve done that I mostly just sit there moving files around.

FitGlass took me longer to name than anything else I’ve built. This is where it came from, and why an app about food ended up named after an hourglass.

The app that wouldn’t tell me its name

Before any of this I was building something completely different.

The idea was simple and a bit petty. You want something, say a jacket or a flight home, and instead of the price the app tells you how many hours of work it’ll cost you. It knew your income, it tracked what you spent, and it turned money back into time.

I liked that idea a lot. I just couldn’t name it. I made lists, I asked every AI model I had access to, and everything that came back sounded like either a budgeting spreadsheet or a startup that had already folded. The thing sat there half-built and nameless for weeks.

A cold brew reel, of all things

Then one afternoon I was scrolling and a reel came up about making cold brew. There was an hourglass sitting in the background of the shot, doing the thing hourglasses do, and I stopped on it.

That was the app. It had been in the background of a video about coffee the whole time.

HourGlass. You want the thing, here’s what it costs you in time. I closed the app and went and built it.

Most of my ideas show up like this, which I’ve stopped fighting. Never when I sit down to have one.

HourGlass turned into something I didn’t plan

The wishlist app became one app out of several. I kept adding to it because it was fun, and because I was learning the kind of thing you only learn by shipping something and watching people use it wrong.

RetroGlass came out of work. It ran sprint retros, and my team at Vendasta actually used it, which was a strange and good feeling. Stacked was my to-do list, built because no other to-do list had ever lasted a month with me. The original wishlist app got renamed Earned, which is what it should have been called from the start.

So HourGlass wasn’t an app anymore, it was a platform. That’s the part of the story where things are supposed to go well.

Instead my motivation just went. Not in a dramatic way. I’d open the repo, feel nothing, close it again, and then do that a few days in a row. It had grown into something I hadn’t set out to make and I couldn’t really remember why I’d wanted it. Stopping was harder than it sounds. But I stopped, and went looking for something I’d care about again.

Meanwhile I was trying to sort myself out

Around the same time, unrelated to any of this, I was trying to get my own life in order. I started going to the gym. I wanted to eat better.

I’m terrible at this, to be clear. I’ve started my fitness journey more times than I can count. This wasn’t some big turnaround moment, it was attempt number five or so.

If you’re going to do that you need a way of keeping score, so I went looking for an app. I’d used MyFitnessPal before. I’d used Cronometer. Both have genuinely good nutrition data behind them and I don’t want to be unfair about that, because the data is the hard part and they’ve done it.

Same thing happened every time though. I’d log for a few days, maybe a week, and stop. A week was my record, and I set that record while paying for a subscription.

It was always the same three things:

• Scrolling past a hundred entries to log one meal. By the time I’d found the right rice I’d lost interest in logging the dal.
• An interface built like a spreadsheet. Opening it felt like opening a tax return. Nothing about it made me want to come back the next day.
• Paying to log my own food. Getting asked for money to type in what I ate, after a certain number of times, still doesn’t sit right with me.

None of that is about the data. It’s about how the thing feels to use, which is the part I can do something about.

So I built the one I wanted

I wasn’t trying to start a company. I was trying to fix my own week-one problem, which is that I’d never once made it to week two.

So the brief was small and fairly selfish. Logging a meal should take seconds. It should work for the way I actually eat, which is mostly food that never had a barcode on it. It should be something I don’t mind opening. And it shouldn’t charge me to write down what I had for lunch.

That last one turned into a real rule. FitGlass is free where it matters. There’ll be a paid plan eventually and it’ll sit where there’s an actual cost behind it, because the AI logging does cost money to run and somebody has to cover that. If you don’t, I do. That seems like a fair place to draw a line; a search box isn’t.

The other rule is about your data. A food log says a lot about a person: what your body is doing, what your household eats, sometimes your religion, usually your health. That should be working for you and not for whoever wants to buy it. So there are no ads, nothing tracking you across apps, nothing sold, and you can export the whole thing or delete it from inside the app without emailing me first.

Why FitGlass

The name loops back, which is the bit I like about it.

HourGlass took something invisible and put a number on it. You wanted a jacket, and it told you what that jacket cost in hours of your life. FitGlass is doing the same thing with food. There’s a lot going on in a plate that you can’t see, and the whole job of a tracker is to show you that without making it feel like homework.

Then there’s the hourglass itself, which can’t be rushed. It moves a grain at a time and the only way to get to the bottom is to let it run.

Habits work like that too, annoyingly. You don’t get fit in a week and you don’t learn what a portion looks like in a week either. It’s one logged meal at a time, and the job of the app is to keep each one small enough that you don’t give up.

Things take time. That was true of the first app and it’s more true of this one.

What I’m hoping for

My goal for FitGlass is a slightly odd one: I want you to need it less as you go.

If you log for a few months, something shifts. You start knowing that this bowl is about that many calories. You look at a plate and guess before you open the app, and you’re close. At some point the numbers are just in your head.

That’s what the gentle part is for. I’d rather build something you eventually grow out of than something you feel stuck in. I’m aware that’s a slightly ridiculous way to run a business. I’m going to try it anyway.

FitGlass is in open beta on the App Store while I keep working on it. It came out of a nameless app about jackets, a coffee video, and five or so failed attempts at eating properly.

Anyway. I hope it gets you to week two.