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Litmark

A nostalgic reading tracker for people who miss their first library card.

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Inspiration

When I was in elementary school, a small library opened in my village, the first one it had ever had, and every student had to become a member. On our first visit, I saw shelves filled with books other than school textbooks for the first time, and learned about storybooks called novels. I also got my very first library card: a simple piece of cardboard, cut by hand by the librarian, with my name and member number written on it. It made me so happy.

After that, my friends and I went to the library every afternoon after school. At first we didn't go to read; we went to hang out because we knew the librarian. In a small village, everyone knows everyone. Slowly, I started reading whatever I could find. Then I picked up one of my first novels, Girl of Kosovo by Alice Mead, and felt pulled right into the story. That was the start of a lifelong love of books.

I often find myself missing those simple afternoons. I built Litmark to bring that feeling back, so that just looking at the app brings back a small wave of that nostalgia.

What it does

Litmark is a nostalgic reading tracker built around a digital version of a cardboard library card. You log the books you read, and they appear on a card that's simply yours.

  • Your Library Card: your reading life lives on a digital library card inspired by that hand-cut original, and every other feature builds on it.
  • Reading Streak: every day you read fills in your streak, with a shareable weekly or monthly summary card so it doesn't just live in the app.
  • Reading Statistics: each month, Litmark tallies the books you finished, the pages you read, and your average pace, gathered right on your library card.
  • Reading Stamps: milestones along your reading journey, like streaks, pages read, reading time and the size of your collection, earn stamps, collected in a stamp album and shareable as their own paper-style cards.
  • Bookshelf and Collections: browse your library as a decorated shelf, a grid, or a list, filtered by reading status or genre, and group books into your own collections or ones Litmark generates for you by author or genre. Add a book by scanning its ISBN barcode, and Litmark looks it up and flags it first if it's already on your shelf.
  • Import from Goodreads and StoryGraph: bring your existing library over from an export, or back your own up and restore it from a file.
  • Reading Sessions and Quotes: track page progress in real time, re-read a book and it counts every pass, share what you're currently reading, read by a warm adjustable reading light at night, and save a line the moment it stops you as a styled, shareable quote card.
  • Home Screen Widgets: your currently-reading book, your streak, and a shuffled quote, right on the home screen on both iOS and Android.
  • Local-First, No Account: like a paper card in your pocket, your data stays on the device. No sign-up, and the core of the app works fully offline.
  • Pro Features: extra appearances and sound effects, deeper streak history, and no limit on shelf decorations or collections, offered as a monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase.

How we built it

Litmark is built with Flutter, one codebase for both iOS and Android, using Riverpod for state and go_router for navigation. All reading data (books, sessions, quotes, streaks, stamps, and shelf arrangement) lives locally in a drift (SQLite) database, so the core app works fully offline with no account. Firebase handles the operational side: Crashlytics, Analytics, Performance Monitoring, Remote Config, and App Check.

RevenueCat gates Litmark Pro behind a single entitlement that three different products can satisfy: a monthly subscription, a yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase, presented through RevenueCat's hosted paywall and Customer Center, so pricing and copy can change without an app update. Which RevenueCat offering the paywall shows is itself a Firebase Remote Config flag rather than something hardcoded, so switching a reader from the launch-price offering to the steady-state one, or running a pricing experiment, is a flag flip tied to whatever event should trigger it, not a store release.

Launch pricing was a one-time early-bird lifetime purchase at $4.99. The standard offering that follows it is $2.99 monthly, $19.99 yearly, or $69.99 lifetime in the US, with prices set by purchasing power in four tiers, from full price down to about 65% off, and Indonesia set by hand, so Litmark stays affordable in lower-income markets.

The home screen widgets are native (SwiftUI/WidgetKit on iOS, Glance on Android) and read the same local database the Flutter app writes to.

Challenges we ran into

  • Book metadata isn't evenly documented across countries, and even the paid catalog services don't close that gap. Manual entry had to be a real path, not just a fallback for the rare miss.
  • Without a server, keeping the library consistent was entirely on the device: imports from Goodreads and StoryGraph, re-reads, and duplicate detection all had to be reconciled locally.
  • WidgetKit and Glance don't share behavior just because they share a purpose, so the home screen widgets needed two separate builds. A Live Activity for reading sessions is still in progress on both, for that same reason.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Turning organic reach into real purchases: in the last 28 days, 20+ readers bought the early-bird lifetime option out of 550+ active users, without a cent spent on ads.
  • Keeping the core reading log local-first and account-free on purpose, even though that meant solving data integrity myself instead of taking the easier route of standing up an API.

What we learned

  • Working with RevenueCat's hosted paywall and Customer Center meant most of the pricing and plan-switching logic never had to be written as app code at all. The real lesson was learning where the SDK's boundary sits, so I didn't duplicate what it already handles.
  • drift's compile-time-checked SQL made the local-first data model much easier to evolve over many releases than a plain key-value store would have.
  • Designing for a feeling, not just for features, changes every decision, from colors to wording.

What's next for Litmark

  • A real-time reading room, so readers can see what everyone else currently has open.
  • An auto-generated journey timeline: a vertical map of a reader's book history, styled like an old, hand-drawn vintage map.
  • Sync across devices, once there's a real account behind it.
  • A collaboration with real artists to redesign the stamps, the journey map, the shelf decorations, and everything else still drawn in-house.
  • Live Activity integration for an active reading session.
  • Partnering with major and indie publishers to grow Litmark from a reading tracker into an actual bookstore, the kind Kindle and Kobo are today, but built around reading analytics that serve the reader first, not just the sale.

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