Why

I built the tracker I couldn't find. After three decades of migraines, no app I tried actually helped when I needed it most — so I made one that does. Here's the longer version.

Three decades of this

I've lived with migraine for the better part of thirty years, and with severe chronic migraine for the last ten. If you're reading this, you probably don't need me to describe what that's like. You already know the way an attack can take a day — or several — and the quiet dread of wondering when the next one lands.

The apps failed exactly when it mattered

I tried the trackers. They made it hard to capture the details my doctors actually asked for, and they were full of small, frustrating edge cases — the kind of thing you do not want to fight with when you're in pain, nauseous, and squinting at a too-bright screen. When logging is a chore, you stop logging. And then you walk into an appointment with nothing but a vague memory of a bad month.

A migraine isn't a single moment. It's a course of events over time — and almost nothing was built to record it that way.

What I actually wanted

Most apps only note when the pain started and when it stopped. I wanted something that captured the whole shape of an attack: when it began, how it built, what I took and when, and how my body responded over the hours that followed. That's the record a doctor can use, and it's the record that finally shows you a pattern.

I wanted it to be usable when I was at my worst: big buttons, a simple screen, dark mode so the display doesn't feel like an ice pick, and logging that takes seconds. Nothing clever — just the essentials, without friction.

The days in between count too

We fixate on “migraine days,” but one of the most telling numbers is how many days were completely clear — because even on a pain-free day you can be carrying the after-effects, or the anxiety of waiting for the next one. So MigraLog tracks the good days too, and shows you the ratio changing over time. That's how you see whether things are actually getting better.

Your data stays yours

Everything lives on your phone. No account, no analytics, no servers, no business model that depends on your symptoms. You can export all of it, any time, and take it to any doctor — it's yours. And because it's open source, you don't have to take my word for any of that.

— From one migraine sufferer to another.