breathe
A minimal breathwork web app. Open it, breathe, close it. No account, no gamification, no upsell.
Type: live. Platform: web. Year: 2024.
I'd been recommending breathwork to students for years - box breathing before exams, 4-7-8 to wind down, physiological sighs for acute stress. Good advice. The kind I never personally kept up with, because every app I tried felt like it was built for someone else. So I built it on Replit over a few weeks. A web app, not a native app - because the web is immediate. No install, no App Store approval cycle. You share a link, someone opens it on their phone, and it just works.
Why I built this
Clinical UIs that felt like medical software. Feature lists that required a tutorial. Or the opposite - so stripped back they gave you no guidance at all. I wanted something that felt like a piece of calm design sitting on your desk. Open it, breathe, close it. No account, no gamification pressure, no upsell after every session. I also wanted to properly explore building something with AI assistance - not just using Copilot autocomplete, but genuinely pair-programming with Claude for the hard parts, and seeing where that worked well and where I still needed to make the calls myself.
Stack
- React
- Vite
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Framer Motion
- Three.js
- Replit
- Claude
- Stripe (removed)
Learnings
- The web is underrated for this kind of app. No install, no review cycle, works on every device. The assumption that breathing apps need to be native is mostly habit.
- Animations are harder than logic. You can test logic. Animations you feel. 'Smooth' is a subjective target that takes longer to hit than any bug fix.
- AI pair-programming works best when you know what you want and can't remember the syntax. It's less useful when you don't know what you want - it'll give you something, but it won't be the right thing.
- Paywalls create a decision before an experience. That's fine if you have an established audience. If you're building something new, let people feel it first.
- Scope creep isn't always wrong. The 3D particle ring was out of scope. It's also the thing most people mention when they describe it.
I'd been recommending breathwork to students for years - box breathing before exams, 4-7-8 to wind down, physiological sighs for acute stress. Good advice..