Steps is a contact in your Messages. Once a day, at the hour you choose, it asks how today went — you answer in a word. Miss a text and nothing breaks: your count keeps going, and Steps just checks in gently. The only thing that ever resets the counter is you saying a slip happened — and even then, your total clean days stay on the record. No app to open, no feed to scroll, no confetti.
At your hour, Steps asks how today went. One word logs the day — and anything more you say is kept as that day's note: what made it hard, what worked, who was there. Notes are optional, for your eyes only, never required. Milestones — a week, a month, ninety, a year — get quietly marked along the way.
You fall asleep, you travel, you forget — life happens. Steps follows up gently and your count keeps going. The only thing that resets it is you saying so.
Say it in three words and move on. The counter starts over; your total clean days and your history don't go anywhere. No guilt trip, no streak-shaming — tomorrow's text arrives like always.
Each habit gets its own counter and its own day one — cigarettes can be on day 132 while drinking is on day 47. One daily text covers every count, and each streak stands, or resets, on its own.
On the Partner plan, someone you choose will get a short weekly report over iMessage — your count and your check-ins, never your words or notes. A promise made out loud is harder to quietly drop. Solo is ready today; Partner arrives soon.
Flip it on and the check-in ends with one extra question: what was good today? Recovery programs have leaned on a small daily gratitude practice for decades — Hazelden Betty Ford recommends it in early recovery. Steps just asks and keeps your answer with the day; no analysis, no lessons. Included in every plan, off by default.
Check-ins happen in Messages — the web is for looking back. Open steps.org and every day is there: the count, the check-in, and your note if you left one — the little record of what made that day hard or easy. Reread it, download it, or delete it, anytime.
Steps will never coach you, cheer you, or talk you through a craving — that's for the humans who love you and the professionals who know you. It does the one small thing a machine should: it keeps an honest count, and it keeps it private. That's the .org: nobody's business but yours.
Quitting apps got loud — communities, courses, AI coaches, badges raining down. Steps is the quiet option: a count you can trust, kept by something with no opinions.
Day counters wrapped in communities, pledges, motivational quotes, and push-notification confetti. Support helps — but an app that needs your attention every day is one more thing to manage on a hard one.
Chatbots that pep-talk you through a craving sound helpful. But your 2 AM message deserves a human, not a model — and advice is exactly what a bot shouldn't hand out. Only a human should.
One text a day, one honest count, zero opinions. Encrypted, kept in the EU, never sold, never fed to AI. What you're quitting stays between you — and, if you choose, one person in your corner.
| Steps | I Am Sober | Reframe | Sunnyside | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $5/mo or $38/yr · Partner $10/mo or $76/yr | Free tier · Plus $9.99/mo or $39.99/yr | From $13.99/mo · $79.99–119.99/yr | $99/yr · $298/yr with coaching |
| What you can track | Anything you’re quitting | Any habit | Alcohol | Alcohol |
| Lives in | iMessage — nothing to install | Its own app | Its own app | Its own app + texts |
| Daily effort | One text, answered in a word | Pledges & reviews | Daily tasks & courses | Drink plans & logging |
| AI & coaching | None — by design | Motivations & milestones | Courses, toolkit, community | AI coach · human coaching extra |
| Community feed | None | Built in | Built in | None |
| Accountability partner | One person, weekly iMessage report | — | — | — |
Competitor details from their published App Store listings and websites, July 2026. "—" means not offered as a comparable built-in feature. All names belong to their owners; all three are fine products if a community or coaching is what you're after.
Once a day, at the hour you choose, it texts you and asks how today went. You answer in a word — "clean", "made it", "slipped" — and Steps keeps the count: your current run, your total clean days, your milestones. Say anything more and it's kept as that day's note — what made it hard, what worked — for your eyes only, never required. Everything sits on the web at steps.org, day by day. That's the whole product. No community, no courses, no advice.
Anything you're stepping away from — alcohol, nicotine, weed, gambling, pills, porn, junk food, the nightly Uber Eats order, anything. And not just one thing: Steps keeps a separate counter for each, with its own day one — cigarettes on day 132 while drinking is on day 47 — and one daily text covers them all. You name each in your words, or don't name it at all: Steps can count your days without ever knowing what they're days from.
Nothing bad. Your count keeps running — a missed text is a missed text, not a slip. Steps follows up gently the next morning to ask where things stand. The only thing that ever resets your counter is you reporting a slip.
You say so, in as few words as you like, and Steps logs it — no lecture, no guilt trip. The counter goes back to day one, but your total clean days and your whole history stay on the record. The next evening, the check-in arrives like always. A slip is a data point, not a verdict.
No — and it never will. We're human first: encouragement, advice, and hard conversations belong to the people who love you and the professionals who know you, not to software. Steps keeps an honest count and stays out of the way. The full list of things it will never say is public, at steps.org/safety.
What you're quitting is nobody's business. Your check-ins are encrypted on the way to us and while they're stored, kept in EU data centers, and read by no one — not an ad network, not an AI model, not a human. We don't even need to know what you're counting days from; you can keep that word to yourself forever.
Nothing is sold, nothing teaches an AI, nothing is shared — except, on the Partner plan, one number: your day count, sent weekly to the one person you chose. Take everything with you, or erase everything, whenever you like. Read our privacy promises →
