Halera

Who builds Halera

Halera is written, designed, supported and released by one person: Lee Crowe, an independent software developer in Kentucky. There is no team, no investors and no growth department. Every page on this site, every screen in the app and every reply to a support email comes from the same person.

Lee Crowe, who built Halera.

Why Halera exists

Halera started as a tool for its author's own health and fitness tracking. The apps available at the time either carried advertising, charged a subscription before doing anything useful, or needed three separate apps to cover food, fasting and blood pressure. Halera was built to cover all of it in one daily log, and turned out useful enough to be worth releasing.

Why there are no ads

An advertising-funded health app has a commercial reason to know what you eat, what you weigh and what your blood pressure is. Halera is funded by a single optional subscription that lifts the monthly cap on AI photo estimates, which cost real money to run. Nothing else is held back, no advertising appears anywhere in the app, and no data is sold to anyone. That is a structural choice rather than a promise: with no advertiser in the business model, there is nobody to sell to.

Experience

Twenty years of IT infrastructure work came before Halera: systems administration, server management, support, and migrations — the kind of job where somebody else's data is your responsibility and the thing has to still work on Monday. Lee holds an MBA and an MSMIT.

That background is where Halera's less visible decisions come from. It is why the log lives on boring, well-understood infrastructure rather than something novel, why the export button exists and is free, why deleting an account really deletes it, and why "what happens when this breaks" gets asked before a feature ships rather than after.

Halera's first public release was in , and it has been updated continuously since — the changelog records every release with a date, which is a more useful claim about experience than a number of years would be. One person writes the application code, the native iOS and Android shells, this website, the privacy policies and the replies to support email.

The same developer runs Lee Crowe Software Solutions LLC, which has published two other products for IT administrators: ServerBridge, a desktop tool for migrating on-premises file servers to Microsoft 365, and License Auditor, which finds unused Microsoft 365 licences. Both are listed at leecrowesoftware.com. That is where the working knowledge of data handling, migrations and platform APIs behind Halera comes from.

What else he works on

Lee Crowe Software Solutions LLC is the company behind Halera. It also publishes business software for IT administrators — tools for Microsoft 365 migrations and licence auditing — which is unrelated work that happens to fund the time spent on a health app nobody pays for.

How Halera is built

Halera is one codebase. The same TypeScript and React application runs as the website you are reading and, wrapped in a native shell, as the iPhone and Android apps — which is why a fix usually lands everywhere at once rather than on one platform first. Accounts are handled by Firebase Authentication, so no password ever reaches Halera in a readable form. Logs are stored in a Microsoft Azure environment in the United States, and AI estimates are produced by Azure OpenAI: a photo or a typed description goes out, an estimate comes back, and the input is discarded rather than retained.

Being one person shapes the technical choices more than any preference does. There is no capacity to maintain two separate native codebases, so there is one. There is no team to operate complicated infrastructure, so the infrastructure is deliberately boring. Features that would need continuous moderation, a content pipeline or a support rota do not get built, because a promise that cannot be kept alone is worse than a missing feature.

What Halera will not do

No advertising, on any tier, ever. No selling or sharing data with advertisers, data brokers or marketing networks. No dark patterns around cancellation: the subscription is cancelled through whichever app store billed you, and nothing in the app is designed to make that harder to find. No locking your history behind a paywall — the export is free CSV for any date range, including after a subscription lapses. And no medical claims. Halera records what you tell it and does the arithmetic; it does not diagnose, interpret symptoms or suggest treatment.

How releases work

Every change is written down on the changelog with a date, in plain terms rather than version numbers, including the unglamorous ones — a button moved, a crash fixed. That page exists so the question "is this thing still maintained?" can be answered by reading rather than by trust. Both app stores review each release before it reaches anyone, which is why a fix written on a Tuesday may not appear on a phone until later in the week.

How to get in touch

support@gethalera.com reaches the developer directly, not a ticketing queue. Bug reports, missing features and "why does it do this" questions are all welcome. The support page answers the most common ones already.

Replies are usually same-day, occasionally next-day, and always from a person rather than a template. Bug reports are the most useful thing anyone can send: a screenshot and a sentence about what you expected to happen is enough, and there is no form to fill in. Feature requests get an honest answer rather than a placeholder — sometimes that answer is that the feature would take more maintenance than one person can promise to keep up, which is a better thing to hear than silence.

What he has written here

Elsewhere

Not medical advice. Halera is for personal wellness tracking only. It is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice — consult a healthcare professional for any medical concerns.