I want to build a non-judgment app for people (like me) who are trying to reduce their impact on animal cruelty by reducing factory farmed meat consumption. I'm trying to reduce my impact by eating at most one standard serving of meat per day, and making one day a week to be fully vegetarian or vegan.
To keep me honest and encourage me to continue making progress, I want to build an app similar to those that track calories or alcohol intake. You can enter how many portions of animal products you ate (including zero) and it will show a daily/weekly "cruelty score" (to be renamed!) to help you set goals & track progress. The score will be more for factory farmed meat, lower for milk, eggs, lower still for certified humane meat or animal products. It will be zero for plant products, alternate meat etc. The app would let you set goals, track progress towards them and reward you when you reach them. It will also let you share your progress with friends or on social media to encourage others to be mindful of their impact as well.
I've been in tech since 2008. I have worked at Microsoft, Google and am currently working at Meta. I built an iPad app during my grad school and was on the Android team at Google. I'm also a co-author on a book about finding malware in the Android ecosystem. I'm passionate about reducing animal cruelty.
Here's my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sai-deep-tetali-b8608310a
My Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YaA4JEwAAAAJ&hl=en
The book I co-authored recently: https://nostarch.com/androidmalwarehandbook
$1000 to $2000. The money allows me to hire a designer as that's not my expertise
No response.
~80%
Aidan Alexander
5 months ago
Hey there, we have a tool that encourages people who aren't willing/able to go vegan yet to offset their impact on animals through donations to effective charities: https://compassioncalculator.org/
Seems like it would be valuable to encourage users to offset their consumption as they reduce it in the app so that they're doing more good for animals on their diet journey (whatever their ultimate destination).
If you'd like to chat about this, hit me up at aidan@farmkind.giving
Sai Deep Tetali
3 months ago
@FarmKind Would love to chat more! I will follow up with you through email.
Constance Li
5 months ago
Hey just tested out the app. Works very smoothly.
a couple points of feedback:
I think there is an opportunity to add a bit more education. The words in the beginning were really nice, but I can't find them again once I enter the app. It would be nice to have some sort of clickable link (maybe a pop up in the section where they select the food or in the history section where it explains the reasoning or definition of the units). Also, fish, chicken, and shrimp have way outsized impacts to beef and pork have you considered differentiating these?
Have you seen foodimpacts.org? You could see if you can embed the graph here into the app as an interactive education tool and edit the units based on the impact of each food type. You can also create links or do a collab with Farmkind which offers donation offsets for people who consume animal products. That way, people can have multiple ways to help animals.
also, the total of plant/animal portions a day on the history tab should be on top for better UX.
Sai Deep Tetali
3 months ago
@liconstan Appreciate the feedback! Will take this as I build the next version.
Sai Deep Tetali
5 months ago
The project is now live on the App Store. Please check it out feel free to give me any feedback.
$500 - designer
$100 - App Store developer account fee
$400 - development setup, including an old Mac and developer tools (Cursor and Claude code expenses)
Sai Deep Tetali
about 1 year ago
I thought I updated here but I don’t see it. The app has been released in the App Store in November. Please check it out here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vasture/id6737757459
There are a couple of features in the pipeline currently. More updates would come based on the user feedback.
Would really appreciate any feedback, feature requests and App Store reviews.
Sai Deep Tetali
over 1 year ago
The basic functionality of the app including adding details about meals, ability to customize the map of different foods to their impact, aggregate stats (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) are implemented. The user experience is very barebones at this point.
The app runs on iOS and android
I hired a designer and we did a couple of iterations on the design of the app. Most of the screen designs are fleshed out. A couple more are in progress.
Finish the design of the remaining screens
Implement the new designs into the app
Once the designs are implemented, I would really appreciate if anyone who’s interested can try the app and give me feedback. This would be an early version and might have some basic bugs and issues.
Dony Christie
almost 2 years ago
Aren't eggs one of the worst products, moreso than meat? Also, IIRC rice farming(?) involves killing mice. I'd want to use such an app if I could subjectively set the associated cruelty scores and if I was more confident that it was accurate.
That said, this does sound like it could have a lot of potential to grow, assuming a good marketing plan.
Sai Deep Tetali
almost 2 years ago
@Wormhole Agree with making the scores customizable. Others have asked for this feature as well. Thanks for your support!
Anton Makiievskyi
almost 2 years ago
Adding money to reach the minimum funding bar. @saideep please post ~monthly updates on your progress if you can. It would be interesting and useful to me and others
Sai Deep Tetali
almost 2 years ago
@AntonMakiievskyi Appreciate your support! That sounds great — I would also love to get periodic feedback from you and other interested folks on the app.
Jason
almost 2 years ago
Could you clarify what a "designer" is? Maybe that is more obvious to people with a development background, but I don't know if you mean art, UI, or something else.
Sai Deep Tetali
almost 2 years ago
@Jason That’s what I meant, someone who can design the user experience. Thank you for your support!
Alyssa Riceman
almost 2 years ago
What sources will you be using to set the numbers on the cruelty score? And do you have any plans to support alternative user-set numbers in the event that users disagree with you on prioritization? For example, if users are more concerned than you are with the possibility of plant suffering, will you allow them to set numbers on plant suffering in such a way as to have those numbers then propagate through the app and be reflected in larger numbers for plant products, larger numbers for animals raised on a diet of plant products, et cetera?
Sai Deep Tetali
almost 2 years ago
@Alyssa You raise great points. Part of the development work is finding systematic ways to come up with the numbers. I like the idea of making them user configurable and it would be relatively easy to implement it.