People assume there's a big company behind an app. There isn't one behind this. There's me — a woman on HRT, a technical professional by day, a house music DJ at the weekend, with a full and noisy life I rather like. HRTMe exists because at one point that life got very hard, my HRT was one more thing I couldn't afford to get wrong, and the tools out there were useless. So I built my own.
Here's the honest version.
It started with two patches and a fortnight
I was on Everol Sequi (sequential HRT). On the surface it's pretty simple, ff you are on it too, you'll know the drill: one patch for two weeks, then a different patch for the next two. So yeah, it sounds simple, until you're standing in the bathroom on a Tuesday going, "hang on — is this a change day? which patch am I even on?" I tried phone alarms. I tried a pill-reminder app. None of them understood that the medication itself changes halfway through the cycle. They'd just buzz at me. Thanks, very helpful.
So, being the sort of person who builds things and also easily forgets things, compounded by menopause, I built something small for myself. Just for the Sequi patches. Just to stop me second-guessing in the bathroom.
Then my sister needed it. Then my friends. Then it got complicated.
My sister's regimen was more involved than mine — a progesterone tablet alongside more medications and gels for part of her cycle. So I made it handle that. Then friends started asking, and their regimens were more complex again — proper, multi-medication, changes-partway-through-the-cycle complexity, breaks in cycles. Every time someone asked, I built the bit that was missing.
At some point I looked at it and thought: it seems a genuine shame not to share this with all of us. Because none of us were being given a simple way to manage the HRT we'd actually been prescribed.
The hardest year — and why "low-effort" mattered so much
I won't dress this up. The stretch where this app really became necessary was when one of my parents was terminally ill. I was dealing with the overwhelming sadness of that and holding down a very stressful job, trying to stay myself and to stay socialising — and somewhere in all of that I still had to manage my own HRT. When you're that stretched, and running on brain fog, remembering any medical routine is genuinely one task too many.
That's the thing I most want other women to understand about how this app is built. It's not designed to be clever at you. It's designed for the days when you have nothing left to give it. A tap to say "done." A glance to see what's next. No login, no faff. Because I built it during the time I had the least capacity in my life, for exactly that kind of time.
I wanted to know if any of it was actually working
The other thing that drove me mad: changing my medication — the timing, the strength, the change of medication — and having no real idea whether it made a difference. You change something, weeks pass, and you're left with a vague feeling and a fading memory by the time you see your doctor.
I'm technical. I wanted data. So I added symptom tracking, wellbeing check-ins — mood, energy, the brain fog I was fighting through every day — and the charts and GP reports that turn all that logging into something you can actually see. Not some cloud AI deciding how I felt — just my own days, on my own phone, with the real patterns pulled out and put in front of me. I kept symptoms on paper for years and never spotted a thing. The app did it at a glance.
Built by a woman on HRT, for women on HRT
I made HRTMe for us. Read more about how it works in the FAQ, or see which HRT brands we support. Deliberately, unapologetically, for women. Your HRT and your symptoms are nobody else's business, which is why everything stays private on your own phone — no account, no data selling, none of it.
I still socalise a lot. I still have the busy, full life I'm not willing to give up. And I still use this app every single day, because I'm still on HRT and I still need it to be effortless. If you're juggling a complicated regimen through a complicated life, I hope it takes one thing off your plate. That's all it was ever meant to do.
— Jane
HRTMe is a medication reminder and wellbeing tracking tool. It doesn't provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always follow your prescribing clinician's instructions.