Coming soon · iOS 26

A register of things that return.

The grown-up obligations todo apps were never built for — the ones that come back around (smoke detector batteries, the dentist, the boiler) and the ones that come back to mind (the fire extinguisher you keep meaning to buy, the password manager, the will). Gister surfaces them quietly when their time has come.

Entry 01

gis·ter/ˈɡɪs.tər/ n.

(English, colloq.) clipping of register; a private record of small, returning matters one means not to forget.
(English) one that gives the gist; an agent or application that distils, from the great mass of one’s small affairs, the matter presently at hand. Cf. analyser.
(Dutch) gisteren — yesterday; the day by which, by rights, all this ought already to have been done.

Join the waitlist See what it tracks

00 · Topics

It asks once. Then tends the rest.

Slow obligations group into topics — fire safety, identity, money, the will. Each is a short conversation, in plain voice, when you actually have a few minutes.

A topic card in Gister, on iPhone — the home-network topic with a short, conversational prompt and a 'Tap to begin' invitation. — Discover surface · English build

Topic, not task.

You don’t think "renew the bike-insurance review". You think "insurance time". Gister meets you at that altitude — one card per topic, the items inside dealt with together.

Plain voice.

Where it asks, it asks the way a slightly nosy friend would. "Do your 2FA codes live in the password manager — or in SMS that anyone can spoof?" Yes, no, or doesn’t apply. That’s the whole vocabulary.

Only what’s actually next.

The boiler check waits for you to confirm you have a boiler. The ID-card item stays out of the way if you’ve said you don’t carry one. Nothing surfaces until its prerequisites are answered.

01 · Principles

What Gister refuses to do.

Three commitments held quietly. Most app categories grow by saying yes; Gister grows by saying no.

Months, not days.

If it recurs weekly, it isn’t ours. Gister begins where the calendar tires and the year thickens into obligation. Smoke detector batteries, not Tuesday’s groceries.

No filing, no nagging.

A thing returns when it is near due — surfaced once, plainly, and then it is quiet again. No streaks, no shaming, no daily ping. And nothing for you to organise: no projects, no tags, no shared lists. Gister groups items into topics for you. You consult; you don’t curate.

III

No AI, just smarts.

No LLM in the loop, no chatbot pretending to know your life. Just good old logic, carefully written scripts, and copy from a human who actually cared. The cleverness sits in the design — not bolted on with a model.

02 · What it tracks

The slow-cycle stuff of a life.

A curated library of recurring grown-up things. Engage the topics that apply; ignore the ones that don’t. Add your own. Nothing is mandatory.

Home maintenance

⌂

The list you’d be glad your parents kept for you.

Smoke detectors. Boiler service. Washing-machine filter. The chimney every other autumn.

Identity documents

✢

The papers you’ll regret losing in airport security.

A passport renews itself in six weeks. Which sounds fine until it’s five days.

Health · routine

Six months. Already?

Dentist. Eye exam. Skin check. The booster you keep meaning to.

Money & insurance

€

Things you stopped using, still paying for.

A twenty-minute sweep through your bank statements. Most people come out €15–40 a month lighter.

Password & 2FA hygiene

⌨

The ten minutes that save the next ten years.

One password manager. Same app, every device. The single highest-leverage thing you can do for your digital safety.

Will & end-of-life planning

What to write down before the lawyer asks.

An afternoon and €400 once. Fifteen minutes every three years. Not morbid — one less thing to worry about.

Twenty-plus topics in the launch library. Add your own anytime — Gister handles user-created obligations and library topics in the same register.

03 · In your week

It shows up once, then steps back.

Three touchpoints. Each calibrated to the cadence of long-term obligations — not the rhythm of a daily todo list.

One quiet digest a month.

Around the start of each month, a single notification: "Three things this month." Tap through, see them, deal with what you can. No daily ping. No streak you’ll feel guilty about breaking.

Plan it where you live.

When something tickles and you want to put time on the calendar for it — disaster kit, the will, the boiler service — a single tap drops it into the calendar app you already use. Edit there, delete there; Gister keeps its own counsel.

The library when you’re curious.

One consultative ledger of everything Gister tracks for you. Search it, filter it, browse what’s filed for later. You consult it; you don’t act on it. Acting happens on the home tab, when something is actually due.

04 · Where it lives

Yours. Synced. Exportable.

Gister is a single-person register that lives in your iCloud account. We see none of it.

Storage

Your iCloud, your devices.

Obligations live in your private iCloud database — there to sync to a second iPhone if you have one. The author has no servers, no analytics, no third-party SDKs.

Tracking

None. Not the polite kind, either.

No event pixels, no telemetry, no ad networks, no crash reporters that phone home with personal data. The app is a quiet local instrument.

Right to leave

Walk away with everything.

Export the full register as JSON or Markdown anytime. Open it in another app, archive it as a file, paste it into a doc. Your obligations belong to you, not to the app you registered them in.

05 · Pricing

Paid, plainly. No tricks.

A modest annual fee with a free trial long enough to actually use it. Free accounts don’t pay with their data; paid accounts pay so we don’t have to.

Gister Coming soon

Everything in the register, the full library, all future updates.

Unlimited obligations and topics
Curated library — all 20+ topics, all updates as they ship
iCloud sync between your iPhones
JSON / Markdown export, anytime
Calendar handoff for the things you want to plan

No ads. No data sale. No "free tier" that quietly limits you to ten obligations. The free trial is a real free trial.

Waitlist

When TestFlight opens, we’ll write you one short email.

Not a newsletter. A single message with a TestFlight invite when the build is steady enough to share. Then we go quiet again.

One email when the TestFlight invite is ready, then nothing else unless you ask.