I Built a Drink Tracker App With AI — Here's What Happened

Before COVID, I joined a CrossFit gym. I liked it more than I expected. One of the things the gym did around the new year was a group health challenge — a points system where you earned credit for things like workouts, walks, and getting enough sleep, and lost points for things that worked against you, drinks included. It was all good-natured and fun, but it introduced me to something I hadn't really done before: actually tracking the tradeoffs.

That idea stuck with me. I like IPAs. I enjoy a happy hour with friends. I'm not trying to stop doing either of those things. But I started to notice that I'd finish a week feeling like I'd made choices I hadn't fully counted — not a moral failure, just a math problem. I didn't actually know what I was consuming, calorie-wise or drink-wise, and I wanted to.

I tried an app at the time. I don't remember which one, but I remember getting stuck in some kind of loop where it just didn't work for me — couldn't log in, couldn't get it set up, eventually gave up on it. The moment passed. Then the gym closed. Then COVID.

A few years later the itch came back. I still like IPAs. I still enjoy happy hours. I'm now in my mid-thirties, in an MBA program, trying to stay in shape, and I'd started getting into some higher-ABV stuff — double IPAs, imperial stouts — without really thinking about what that meant for the actual numbers. I wanted something simple that would just tell me the truth. No programs, no streaks, no judgment. Just data.

The problem was I still couldn't find an app that did what I wanted without being annoying about it. So I built one.

The Beer That Started It

Seventh Son Brewing, a Columbus craft brewery, made a collaboration beer with Fox in the Snow — the local bakery and café that has a line out the door on weekend mornings. The beer is called Fox in the Stout: a salted chocolate imperial stout inspired by their salted brownie. Cocoa nibs, vanilla beans, flaked oats. It's a dessert in a can. It's also 9.7% ABV.

I had one on a Friday evening and thought nothing of it. Then I had another. By any casual count that was "two beers." Except it wasn't. At 9.7% ABV in a 12oz can, each one is about 1.9 standard drinks — nearly two. Two cans of Fox in the Stout is closer to four standard drinks than two. That math adds up fast and is easy to miss when you're just thinking "it's a beer."

One 12oz can of Fox in the Stout at 9.7% ABV = 1.94 standard drinks.
A regular 5% beer = 1.0 standard drinks.
The difference is real, and almost nobody thinks about it.

That's the moment the app became personally useful to me. Not as an accountability tool or a sobriety tracker — just as an honest accounting of what's actually in the glass. If I'm going to drink, I want to know what I'm drinking.

The Build

I want to be clear: I am not a developer. I'm a CFP® professional and financial advisor. I can read a balance sheet, I can explain the difference between a traditional and Roth IRA, and I know my way around a spreadsheet. But before I started using AI tools, my coding experience was basically zero.

I used Claude Code — Anthropic's CLI tool — as my collaborator. I described what I wanted, Claude wrote the code, I gave feedback, and we iterated. The whole thing came together in a single afternoon. By the time I closed my laptop that evening, the app was live.

"Add a barcode scanner so I can just point my camera at the bottle."
Done.

"Show a weekly goal tracker — I want to see how many standard drinks I've had vs. my limit."
Done.

"Make it sync across devices so I can log from my phone or laptop."
Done.

Every time I described something I wanted, it appeared. That's still a strange feeling to describe. You have an idea, you explain it out loud, and then it exists. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it's genuinely what the experience is like.

What It Actually Does

The app is called Sip Tracker. Here's what it does:

You can log a drink by typing in the name, or scan the barcode on the bottle and it'll pull in the details automatically — ABV, serving size, calories. It calculates standard drinks based on actual alcohol content, not just "one drink = one drink." A 9% IPA and a 4.2% light beer are not the same thing, and the app knows that.

You can set a weekly goal — mine is a standard drinks limit — and the app tracks your progress against it. You see a running total for the week, a history of what you've logged, and a calorie count over time. It's account-based, so your data syncs whether you're logging from your phone, laptop, or wherever.

That's it. No social features. No streaks. No judgmental push notifications. Just data.

The Privacy Part

I want to be straightforward about this: your data is yours. The app requires an account, which means your logs are tied to you and not shared by default with anyone else. I'm not selling anything, I'm not monetizing this, and there's no ad model. It's a personal project that I made public because it seemed useful and other people asked about it.

If you're uncomfortable logging something health-adjacent into a web app run by some guy in Ohio, that's completely fair. Use a spreadsheet. Use the notes app on your phone. The data-keeping habit matters more than the tool.

The Honest Reaction

When I tell people I built this, the reaction is usually some version of "wait, you built an app?" And then I explain that I didn't write the code myself — Claude wrote the code — and then the reaction shifts to "okay, but isn't that cheating?"

I don't think it is. The idea was mine. The requirements were mine. Every decision about what the app should do, how it should behave, what to include and what to leave out — that was all me. Claude is an extraordinarily capable tool, but it doesn't have opinions about how I want to track my beer intake on a Saturday afternoon. That part is still a human job.

What changed is that I no longer need to know how to write React and Firebase from scratch to bring something like this to life. That barrier is gone. And I think that's a genuinely big deal — not just for hobbyists, but for anyone who has ever had a real problem and a clear idea of how to solve it, but no way to build the solution.

Where to Find It

Sip Tracker is live at sip-tracker-web.web.app. It's free to use. You'll need to create an account to log anything, which is how it keeps your data private and synced.

It's also linked from my homepage under AI Experiments, alongside a few other projects I've built the same way.

If you try it and run into something that doesn't work, or have a feature you'd want, feel free to reach out. This is a side project, not a product with a roadmap — but I'm genuinely open to making it better if there's interest.

Open Sip Tracker → ← Back to Blog