About

Hey — my name is Mihai. I’m an engineer, originally born in Romania, currently living in the US. I’d really love to get to work on apps like this full time someday because I love hearing issues people have and building things to help [1].

[1] I made my first thing in the mid-90s, when I was about 5 years old: my grandfather complained that people were tracking mud inside the house on their farm. I found some scrap metal bars, and with my uncle staked them into the ground outside. Last I checked in 2008, they’re still there 🙂

Major Milestone

The update at the end of 2023 marks an exciting milestone – Paced Breathing is now available on both Android and iOS with all features on both platforms!

What’s cool about this is that there is only one codebase for both platforms, so the experience should be the same (I know Android apps often lag behind their iOS counterparts, but Paced Breathing will not be doing that!)

Also, besides a small bug fix earlier this year, this is the 1st real update to Paced Breathing in many many years. From now on, I’m going to aim to provide more regular updates with new features and improvements.

What’s Next

After hearing from many of you over the years, I truly believe Paced Breathing has a lot more potential. Either by adding missing features or offering mini “courses” based on the many interesting ways I’ve heard from you all over the years that you’ve come to use Paced Breathing:

A firefighter said he uses Paced Breathing to train his breathing in case he runs out of oxygen in a burning building. He does this by using something called the Reilly Emergency Breathing Technique (R-EBT), where you slowly inhale then hum as you exhale. Apparently humming is a relatively low effort way to make your body conserve oxygen by exhaling slower, even as you’re rushing to get out of a building. A course teaching and helping to train this technique could help save lives.
A woman recovering from pneumonia said her doctor recommended using Paced Breathing to train up her lung capacity to help her recovery. Many years later, she still uses Paced Breathing for stress relief. A course could help many others dealing with respiratory issues like pneumonia.
A psychologist recommends Paced Breathing to patients with gut issues because research is showing there is a mind-gut connection, where stress and anxiety can manifest as digestive issues (and vice versa). There is a lot of research to unpack here, and a course that guides you through it could help many people.
A user that suffers from insomnia said he uses Paced Breathing at night to help him fall asleep. But there are some things that could be improved here to bring this feature to more users (instructions, more sounds, background/white noise, fading out the volume during the session, etc)

To allow me to do that work (which I call “Phase 2”), I have to first go through “Phase 1”:

[DONE] Bring Paced Breathing to iOS to increase the user base
[DONE] Move to subscription service to increase “ARPPU” (average revenue per paying user), while doing right by existing users and keeping a good free tier
[DONE] Add missing features people expect (notifications, background playback, more sounds, etc)
[DONE] Reduce confusion (25% to 50% of people that install Paced Breathing, uninstalling it right away, why?)
[NOW] Raise awareness / grow the app a bit (post to YT, Reddit, etc.)

Subscription Details / If you’ve paid for Paced Breathing

As I mentioned above, I think Paced Breathing has a lot of potential to both help people and bring me a lot of personal joy and fulfillment. Unfortunately, I just can’t justify giving it the attention it needs if it can’t also pay my bills. With ads and the $1-$2 one-time purchases, Paced Breathing only makes $3.3k/year, across 55k users. Definitely not enough to make a living. Hence switching to an annual subscription. I know it’s not ideal, and nobody is excited for yet another subscription, but it’s the only path I see. I hope you understand.

Side note on subscriptions: I personally always look for apps with affordable subscriptions rather than free or 1-time payments. That’s because I believe subscriptions are the only real honest way for most apps to operate. It may sound self-serving for me to say that, but I do really believe it. If an app is free or has a one-time payment, the reality is you don’t matter that much to the developer, and often times they’ll either abandon the app, ignore your issues/problems, or resort to sneaky things to make money (eg I recently found out a “free” browser extension for monitoring Amazon prices was actually secretly using my browser to scrape various internet pages and sell that data). I’d much rather pay the dev a small amount every month or year to make sure they keep caring about my experience instead of forgetting about me or turning me into the product.

Of course, I am extremely grateful to everyone that has paid for Paced Breathing, especially those that have been using the app for many years, so I want to make sure you are taken care of:

If you bought the “ad-free” in-app purchase: I promised you that you would “never see an ad ever again”. I am honoring this, you will be ad-free for life.
If you bought the “pro” in-app purchase: you’ll get 3 free months of PacedBreathing+ for every year it’s been since you made that purchase.
If you made a “donate” in-app purchase: you’ll get 3 free months of PacedBreathing+ for every dollar you donated since that donation was made, times by how much you donated in USD. For example: if you donated $3 two years ago, you’ll get 3*2*3 = 18 free months of PacedBreathing+.
If you bought the separate “pro” app: you’ll 2 free years of PacedBreathing+
Notes: I’ll be capping free PacedBreathing+ to a max of 5 years, if you think that’s unreasonable, just reach out!

Check out the ‘Upgrade’ page from the side menu to see if and how much free PacedBreathing+ you get. If you think there’s been a mistake, contact me through the ‘Contact’ page

Anyways, thank you so much for using PacedBreathing, It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to make this app for you!

Breathe Easy,

Mihai