Health Flare is free software. It runs entirely on your device. No account, no server, no analytics. Here is why, in plain terms.
Free and open source, not just free of charge
"Free software" does not mean "software with no price tag." It means software whose source code is public, so anyone can read it, check what it actually does, change it, and redistribute it. That distinction matters a lot for a health app. You should not have to take a company's word for what happens to your data. You should be able to check.
If you have not spent time in the free and open source world, the two reference documents worth reading are the Free Software Definition from the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Definition from the Open Source Initiative. They differ in emphasis (freedom versus practical development process) but agree on the basics: the code is open, you can inspect it, and you are not locked out of your own tools.
Health Flare's code lives at github.com/Health-Flare, including the mobile app itself. You do not need our permission to read it, and you do not need to trust our marketing copy over the code.
Offline first, because your health data does not belong on someone else's server
Chronic illness data is some of the most sensitive information a person can generate: symptom patterns, medications, triggers, the private detail of how a body behaves on a bad day. That kind of data attracts breach risk, resale to data brokers, and use against the very people it describes, in underwriting, employment, or worse.
The usual answer from most software is "we secure it well." We think the better answer is "we never have it in the first place." Health Flare stores everything locally, in the app's private storage, which your phone encrypts when it has a passcode set. There is no login because there is no account to log into. Your phone's own backup can include it, the same as any other app, and that backup is run by Apple or Google under your account, not by us (how that works). But there is no Health Flare server to breach, no Health Flare database to subpoena, and no company standing between you and your own health record.
Why we are using AI to build this, and the tension we are not pretending away
Health Flare is built by a small team using AI-assisted development. We are not going to dress that up as uncomplicated. There are real, unresolved questions around how AI models are trained, what they cost to run, and what they displace. We do not think those questions are settled, and we are not claiming ours is the definitive answer to them.
Here is the reasoning we are actually working from. Calm, private, genuinely useful tools for managing chronic illness should have existed years ago. The technology to build them offline, on-device, without ads or subscriptions or data harvesting, has existed for a long time. Mostly, it was not built that way, because the economics of venture-funded software reward the opposite: accounts, engagement metrics, and data to sell. A small team without that funding, building this kind of software from scratch by hand, on a normal timeline, is a multi-year undertaking that most people in our position could not sustain.
AI-assisted development changes that arithmetic. It lets a small team close a real gap in a realistic amount of time, without waiting on an industry that has had the resources to build this for a long time and largely chose not to. That is the justification we are using, not a claim that the tradeoffs disappear because the cause is good. Every line of code that ships is still reviewed and owned by a person, and we would rather be honest about using the tool than pretend the whole thing was written by hand for the sake of appearances.
Building the tool people actually need
Health Flare started from a personal, specific problem: tracking a child's chronic condition across months, trying to see patterns that are close to invisible when you are living inside them day to day. Most existing tools either require an account and a cloud backend, are built for clinicians rather than families, or bury the useful parts behind a subscription.
We think a tool like this should not be a luxury, and it should not be a means of collecting health data under the guise of helping you manage it. It should just work, stay out of your way on hard days, and belong to the person using it.
No tracking. No cloud. Full stop.
To be specific about what "non-tracking" and "not cloud based" actually mean in Health Flare, rather than leaving it as a slogan:
- No analytics or telemetry of any kind, not even anonymized usage counts.
- No third-party SDKs. Nothing is bundled in to phone home on our behalf.
- No accounts, no login, no server-side profile of you anywhere.
- Fonts and other assets are bundled with the app and this site, not pulled from a third-party CDN that could log the request.
- The only time data leaves your device is when you deliberately export a report to share with a doctor. That is a manual, visible action you take, not something that happens in the background.
If something here does not hold up, or you want to check any of it against the actual code, get in touch. We would rather answer that question than have you take it on faith.