Slotted
Works out what a supplement stack really costs and whether it physically fits in the pill box, before you buy any of it.
Supplement apps are reminder apps with a vitamin theme. They assume the hard part is remembering, so they ship notifications and streaks. Two duller things kill a routine first.
A serving is not a pill. One magnesium glycinate puts 600mg of elemental magnesium behind a four-capsule serving. Read that as one capsule and two things go wrong at once: the bottle empties four times faster than you budgeted for, and you have been taking 150mg while believing you were taking 600. Do that across eight products and a stack you priced at $40 a month costs $120 and does not work.
The compartment also has to close. A weekly organiser gives you three or four compartments a day, and a night slot holding a four-capsule serving plus anything else physically will not shut. You find this out on the Sunday you sit down to fill the box, which is where routines go to die.
The opinionated part is that doses anchor to events rather than to clock times. That came out of looking at one real stack and asking which items had survived six months. The three that survived were the three sitting next to a morning medication that never gets missed; everything scheduled at a time of day was at roughly zero, including the night stack that mattered most.
Details worth knowing
- 01Units per day against units per container, so a multi-unit serving shows its real cost per day and its real reorder date instead of its shelf price.
- 02Slot capacity in units and in millilitres, so overflow shows up as you add rather than on filling day, and powders are routed out of the box entirely.
- 03Interaction and timing rules that each state the mechanism, cite a source where one exists, and say where to move the dose to, rather than just flagging a conflict.
- 04Adherence logging with no streaks: taken, skipped, or nothing, and an unrecorded dose stays blank rather than becoming a failure.
- 05The arithmetic lives in a pure engine with no database in it, which is what makes a public demo of the calculator possible at all.