Wayk makes you do push-ups to stop the alarm — for $9.99 a month. There's a better way to own that habit.

There's an alarm app climbing the charts called Wayk that won't stop ringing until you do your push-ups. The idea is genuinely clever: pick a "mission" before bed — push-ups, a photo of the sky, making your bed — and the alarm holds you hostage until your phone verifies you did it. People love it. It has a 4.8-star rating from thousands of reviewers, and some of them credit it with rebuilding their mornings.

Here's the part the App Store page whispers: you need an active subscription to set an alarm at all. Not for extra features — for the alarm. The base function of an alarm clock, behind $6.99 a week, $9.99 a month, or a yearly plan that runs $19.99 to $39.99 depending on which screen catches you. And per its own privacy label, the app collects usage data to track you across other companies' apps and websites for advertising.

So you'd be renting your alarm clock, and it would be watching you.

The idea is right. The model is wrong.

Let's give Wayk its due: phone-verified effort works. A checkbox is easy to lie to at 6 a.m.; twenty push-ups are not. Making your body move before your brain can negotiate is one of the oldest tricks in habit-building, and putting a camera on it makes it honest.

But an alarm that costs $9.99 a month costs $120 a year. That's more than most people's gym membership costs per month, for an app whose job is thirty seconds of your day. And subscriptions have a way of outliving their usefulness — the average person doesn't cancel when the novelty fades; they just quietly fund it for another year.

What we built instead

Tend started from the same insight — your phone should verify the rep, not take your word for it — and built a habit tracker around it. Then we added the alarm too, on our terms.

For push-ups, squats, and jumping jacks, Tend uses your iPhone's camera to count your reps live, calibrated to how you actually move. Steps and workouts confirm themselves from Apple Health and your Apple Watch. Habits a phone genuinely can't see get an honest checkbox instead of fake verification. Your proof accumulates into a year view you can actually look at in December and feel something about.

And yes — Tend has the alarm too. Alarm missions ring until you earn it: reps the camera counts, a step target, throwing your phone up and catching it, or photographing a spot you registered — the sink, the coffee maker. Link a mission to a habit and finishing the alarm tends the habit too: one wake-up, two things done. It isn't only for mornings, either — a 6 PM alarm can demand its squats just the same.

The differences that matter, side by side:

	Wayk	Tend
Alarm that rings until you do the thing	✓	✓ — reps, steps, throw-and-catch, or photo missions
Verified push-ups	✓ (to stop an alarm)	✓ (to stop the alarm and as a daily habit)
Works without paying	✗ — subscription required to set an alarm	✓ — two habits and one alarm free, every proof type included
Price if you pay	$6.99/wk · $9.99/mo · up to $39.99/yr, forever	$14.99 once — or $1.99/mo if you prefer
Account required	Yes	No
Tracks you for advertising	Yes, per its privacy label	Never — no server, works in airplane mode
What the purchase covers	One alarm app	Every Kraft app, current and future

That last row isn't a typo. Tend's one-time purchase is the Kraft Patron unlock — it also opens Pocket PDF and RacePep, and every app we ship after them. One Wayk-year costs more than owning our whole family outright.

The honest caveats

Our rep counting is tuned for push-ups, squats, and jumping jacks in decent light, not every exercise ever invented. Wayk's mission list is longer (Bible verses, affirmations, math problems), and if one of those specific rituals is your morning, it does them and Tend doesn't. And on the free tier Tend keeps one plain alarm — missions are part of the Patron unlock.

But the mission alarm itself — ringing that won't stop until the camera counts your reps, your steps add up, or you've photographed the coffee maker — plus the habit tracker underneath it, on a phone that isn't reporting you to an ad network: you can own all of that outright for less than seven weeks of renting Wayk.

Tend is free to try with two habits and every proof type. The paywall doesn't nag, and there's no account to make. See how it feels to earn a check mark.