What is VibeChart?
Many studies show that relationships have a huge impact on quality of life*1, yet a quick peek into any social media platform, middle school, or nightclub will reveal that the knowledge of what makes a relationship healthy to be in is eluding vast swaths of the population (myself included). Given my background in data visualization app development, I decided to make an as-objective-as-possible framework for evaluating relationship health, to see which relationships are actually adding to our quality of life, and which ones would be better left in past, with all our other “seemed right at the time” decisions, like whatever we were wearing 15 years ago.
VibeChart is an iOS App that brings data-driven clarity to your interpersonal relationships. Human memory is notoriously malleable, especially during times of high emotional salience *2. This can lead to a kind of time-dilation where however you feel at that moment feels like that’s how you’ve always felt, and always will feel *3. This can make it hard to distinguish which relationships are truly healthy, as a particularly exciting or meaningful moment can adjust your thinking to the degree that you make increasing commitments to potentially harmful partners. Honest, daily, tracking of your emotions, as well as the actions of you and your partner will create an easy-to-read map of the relationship’s Vibe, Stability, and Reciprocity, over time. This allows you to look at your relationships with more logic and objectivity, and identify behavioral and emotional patterns that can be elusive without this long-range data visualization. This can help you set healthier boundaries, and/or permanently step away from harmful dynamics.
While many people track steps, sleep, fertility metrics, or finances, when I was researching whether or not a tool like VibeChart existed already, I couldn’t find any apps that were tracking emotional and behavioral data for interpersonal relationships. Given that relationships have such an outsized impact on quality of life, I decided to remedy the situation. VibeChart’s data visualization platform uses quantified-self style tracking of emotional and behavioral data, aggregated into pretty charts and graphs, to help you spot patterns and make healthy relationship choices. Basically: to see what’s really going on in your important relationships, so you can invest time in the ones that bring joy to your life, and kick to the curb the ones that are detrimental to your wellbeing.
In addition to the graphs, and Vibe, Stability, and Reciprocity metrics, VibeChart’s Insights feature surfaces salient trends for each of the relationships you track. It can be hard to maintain objectivity when emotions are running high. The Insights feature helps wrangle all the feelings and actions into easy to understand patterns, giving you a 30,000 foot perspective on dynamics that can be hard to navigate when you’re in the day-to-day of it. Having access to these insights helps you see things that you otherwise might miss, and allocate your relational energy accordingly.
Whether you are in the early stages of a new romance, navigating a complex friendship, or trying to decide whether to quit your well-paying but soul-crushing corporate job, VibeChart can help you see the macro patterns, and their effect on your well-being over time, enabling you to make decisions your future self will thank you for.
*1 - Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010; Demir & Weitekamp, 2007; Uchino et al., 1996; Londero-Santos et al., 2021; Vaillant, 2012; Waldinger & Schulz, 2023
*2 - Wang J, Lapate RC., 2025
*3 - Ma J et al., 2021
VibeChart is Live!
VibeChart has launched on the App Store
After two years of development, I’m thrilled to announce that VibeChart is available on the App Store!
VibeChart is a relationship health tracking app that helps people identify patterns in their important relationships.
For those familiar with my first app, Kindara, the premise is similar: use data visualization to surface patterns that otherwise go unseen, helping users make decisions that support their health and wellbeing. Except instead of temperature and cervical fluid as the biomarkers, VibeChart tracks your feelings, your actions, and the actions of the other person over time to create a clear picture of key relational health metrics like Vibe, Stability, and Reciprocity.
I’d like to thank all my friends, colleagues, and loved ones who helped me bring this to life, generally, and also the following people specifically:
Scott Ritchie - his patient, generous instruction in Swift programming over the past two years has brought me from total n00b to “actual developer”.
Running a one-person startup can be profoundly disorienting. Caitlin Clarke has helped me choose the next right step over and over again, launching VibeChart way sooner than I would have if left to my own devices.
Eric Grundhauser provided invaluable marketing guidance as this moved toward launch.
Rowan DeWitt’s gorgeous illustrations will be bringing VibeChart to life over the coming months.
And a big thank you to the beta testers for their thoughtful, precise, and forward-thinking support.
This is VibeChart’s first iteration, and I’m going to keep building it out based on user feedback. Check it out and let me know what you think!