Both of us have spent our careers shipping software for phones. Both of us, at some point in the last year, realised we were reading our own apps in bed at midnight and squinting like our parents used to squint at restaurant menus.
The first night Mira tried a homemade red overlay on her phone, she fell asleep ninety minutes earlier. The second night, the same thing. The third night she sent Tom a screenshot at 2 a.m. his time saying “I think this is a product.” Tom, who had been writing his own warm-light prototypes on Android for six months, sent back a screenshot of his.
We could have shipped a free version with banner ads. We could have shipped a subscription. We could have shipped both. Instead we did the boring thing: we charged for it, once, the way you’d charge for a flashlight. The point of Luna is that you stop thinking about it. That is hard to do if the app needs you to renew it every month.
We’re building Luna the way we wish more software was built: slowly, by people whose names you can look up, with no dashboard telling us what to do next. We answer our own email. We push our own builds. When you write to us, the reply is from a person who’s been awake too long.