Why I built Breeze

Eight years of not taking it seriously

My name is Shawn. I was born in 1992 and was diagnosed with gout in 2017, at twenty-five. As it happens, that was also the year I founded my first company. Before that I had been very fond of baijiu and beer. When the first flare came, the pain was genuinely severe; I had to see a doctor and rely on medication to get through it. Three days later the symptoms were gone, and I went back to work.

That set the pattern for the next eight years. Gout was something I cared about intensely during the three or four days a joint was on fire, and not at all in between. I did not track my uric acid. I honestly did not know what my number was. I knew the list of foods I was supposed to avoid, and I treated it the way you treat a speed limit.

Over time the pain started showing up in other places: a toe now and then, then a heel, and eventually a knee. The pattern was always the same. Three or four days, and then nothing.

Until March 2025, when I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing basketball. Nobody touched me. I pushed off, heard a snap, and went down.

During the surgery, the surgeon found the tendon tissue in far worse condition than it should have been in a thirty-three-year-old man. When we talked afterwards, he was direct: in his judgement, years of untreated high uric acid were one of the main reasons. I am not a doctor, and I am not going to turn one surgeon’s assessment of one patient into a claim about anyone else. But for me, that conversation was the first time gout stopped being just a foot problem and became a whole-body problem I had been ignoring.

My daughter had been born the year before. I am not going to write anything sentimental here, except this: I want to live a long time, and I want to still be able to run. Lying in a cast in the summer of 2025, I decided to start managing this properly.

What I actually needed, and could not find

For me, managing gout properly came down to a few unglamorous things: getting uric acid tested regularly, knowing my target, taking my medication as prescribed, noticing what happens before a flare, and bringing real numbers to the doctor instead of “I think it’s been okay”.

I wanted an app for that. The ones I found either demanded an account and my phone number before I could enter a single number, or asked so much of me every day that I gave up in the third week, or turned a chart of purine values into confident dietary advice that nobody had verified. Some food databases had no sources at all. For a condition where the whole point is one number and how it changes over time, that was not good enough.

So I built the one I wanted to use. I work in software products; that is the one thing I brought to this that most patients do not have.

What Breeze is, and what it refuses to be

Breeze is a tracker, not a doctor. It records uric acid, flares, medication adherence and what you ate. It draws your trend against the target you chose together with your doctor. It looks up 830 foods offline and shows the purine value per 100 g along with the publication it came from. It does not diagnose, it does not recommend medication, and it never turns a food chart into a diet plan.

It also does not know who you are. No account, no server, no analytics. Everything you log stays on your phone. That is not a marketing line; it is the reason a single person could build this responsibly. I did not want to run a health database, so I don’t.

The full note on where every number comes from, and what the app will not do, is on the About page.

How I use it myself