The problem
People who follow the news keep asking the same question: how does something on the other side of the world actually affect me? Every news source tells you what happened and where. None of them tell you what it means for your job, your city, or your money.
That gap is why people tune out. It's hard to care about the bigger picture when nobody connects it back to your life. Ripple was built to make that connection explicit, story by story.
About
Most news apps give you a feed of headlines. Ripple gives you a briefing. Tell it where you live, what you do, and what you care about. It pulls from 11 sources, summarizes the day, and shows you how each story actually connects to your life.
Built and shipped solo: a SwiftUI app on the front, with an n8n pipeline, Supabase backend, and the ChatGPT API handling summarization and personalization. Onboarding, paywall, streaming output. All of it.
The core idea
The Ripple Effect
During onboarding, Ripple asks about your life instead of your interests: your work, your town, whether you rent or own, who's in your house. It never mentions AI. That profile is the whole product.
When a story breaks, the pipeline pulls it in (11 sources through n8n and Supabase), strips the publisher framing, and OpenAI reasons about one question: how does this story reach this person's life? Tap “See the Ripple” and that's what you get. Not a summary. The consequences, for you.
A mortgage-rate story reads differently for a renter than for a homeowner with two kids. Ripple is the only news product I know of built around that difference.
“This app is so legit. I want to consume all my content in this form. ‘See the Ripple’ is so fresh, and an amazing use of my info and location.”
Screens
How it works
Build your profile
Location, job, interests, finances, whatever matters to you. The profile is what makes the briefing yours.
Read your briefing
One feed. 11 sources. AI-summarized into plain language. No outrage bait, no algorithmic rabbit holes.
See the Ripple
Tap any story to get a personalized impact breakdown. Not what this means for the world. What it means for you.
How it's built
Impartial outlets, pulled every 4 hours.
Strips source bias and reporter framing.
Summarizes and personalizes per profile.
Stores briefings and user profiles.
Streams your briefing and ripples.
Key decisions
Strip the bias before the AI ever sees it
I picked the 11 sources for impartiality, then built the n8n workflow to strip each story of the source's and reporter's framing before summarization. The briefing starts from what happened, not from how an outlet wanted you to feel about it.
Charge from day one
Every briefing costs real API money to generate. Free users would mean I'm paying to give my work away, so Ripple launched paid: $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Fewer users, but every one of them is sustainable.
Cut the feature I spent two months building
I wanted a water ripple animation to spread from the See the Ripple button. It took me close to two months to get right. Once it finally worked, I realized waiting on an animation gets old fast when you're trying to read the news. I cut it. Looking cool isn't a reason to slow the user down.
Run the pipeline 6 times a day, not 48
The workflow originally ran every 30 minutes. But Ripple isn't a breaking-news app; people use it to understand the news, not to get alerts first. I cut the cadence to hourly, then to every 4 hours. Costs dropped, and not one user noticed.
What went wrong
The ripple output itself was a consistent battle. Generating a full personalized breakdown took 10 to 15 seconds, and early versions made users stare at a blank screen the whole time. I rebuilt it to stream: the text now renders as it arrives from the backend, formatted cleanly mid-stream, so you start reading within a couple of seconds.
Shipping took longer than anything I've built since. Ripple was my first app idea, started in July 2025, and it didn't reach the App Store until February 2026. It was hard enough that I shipped two other apps and put a couple more into TestFlight in the middle of building it.
And the news niche is brutal. I'm competing with CNN, Fox, and Ground News for attention, and getting users has been far harder than building the product. That fight is ongoing.
Results
- 159 downloads
- since the February 2026 launch, in one of the hardest consumer niches to break into.
- 3 paying subscribers
- and 13 active users in the last 28 days. Small numbers, real ones. Every subscriber covers their own costs.
- 48 → 6 pipeline runs/day
- an 8x cost cut with zero user complaints, because the product is about understanding, not breaking news.
- 7 months
- from first idea to App Store, long enough that I shipped two other apps along the way.
With more resources
The product works. Distribution is the bottleneck. With a real budget, half of it goes straight to marketing: paid acquisition on Google and Meta, because a personalized news app can't grow on App Store search alone.
The other priority is a full UI overhaul, making the app smoother and friendlier for people who aren't already news junkies. The core idea is proven to me; the next step is making it effortless for everyone else.
Get it
Ripple is free to download on the App Store. Briefings are a subscription: $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year.