Vale Tech

Case study

Win the Day

Five tasks. One day. No backlog.

A daily task list capped at five. Finish all five and you win the day. Finish four and you lose it. We designed it, built it, shipped it to both stores and the web, and we still run it.

The record

Runs on
iOS, Android and the web, with home screen widgets
Started
January 11, 2026
Built with
Flutter, Firebase, RevenueCat and Stripe
AI assistants
An MCP server, so an AI assistant can run your list
Win the Day onboarding screen that rejects the endless to-do list.
Win the Day task list with all five tasks checked off and a 13 day streak.
Momentum stats with the streak, total wins, win rate and weekday performance.

The problem

Ambitious people do not fail for lack of tasks. They fail from having too many.

A list that grows past a certain size stops saying what matters today. It gets rewritten instead of done, and the list itself becomes the stress.

So the limit has to come from the tool. The app holds five tasks and no more. Wanting to add a sixth is the moment it asks you to choose.

How a day works

  1. An empty Win the Day list at the start of a day, with five open slots.

    1Pick five

    The day starts with five empty slots. You fill them with the five tasks that would make today count.

  2. Win the Day list with three of five tasks done and a 12 day streak.

    2Work through them

    Each task you finish is checked off. The bar at the top shows how close the day is.

  3. The day won screen with confetti after the fifth task is done.

    3Win the day

    The fifth check wins the day. Four is a loss. There is no partial credit, so the standard cannot slip.

  4. The momentum matrix, a year of days marked won, lost or rest.

    4See the pattern

    The streak counts the days won in a row. The momentum matrix shows a year of days as won, lost or rest.

How it is built

Win the Day architecture. The app and an AI assistant both read and write the same task data in Cloud Firestore.
The app and an AI assistant, through the MCP server, work on the same list in Cloud Firestore. Payments arrive from RevenueCat and Stripe. The figure scrolls sideways.
One codebase, three platforms
The app is Flutter. The same code ships to iOS, Android and the web.
Works offline
Tasks live on the device first, in a local database, and sync to Cloud Firestore when there is a connection.
Two sets of functions
Payments and accounts run in one set of Cloud Functions, and the MCP server in another. The MCP code never slows a payment.
Payments from three places
RevenueCat handles the App Store and Google Play. Stripe handles the web. All three land on the same premium flag.

An AI assistant can run your list

Win the Day has its own MCP server, so Claude and other assistants can read and change your list.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard way for an AI assistant to use an app. You connect once. Then you can ask the assistant to plan your five, move a task or read your week.

We deployed the server on July 16, 2026. It has 17 tools, one for each thing the app can do. It is a second client of the same database, so it follows the same rules as the app. A contract test suite checks that the two never drift apart.

The AI assistants screen, with the MCP server address and the access tokens.
The connection flow. The assistant is refused, you sign in and approve, the assistant trades a one-time code for a one-hour token, then adds a task that appears in the app.
Connecting an assistant uses OAuth 2.1. Tokens last one hour and are tied to this server, so a leaked one is short-lived and useless elsewhere. The figure scrolls sideways.
Reviewed
We reviewed the server's security on July 18, 2026. We fixed 8 of 11 findings that day. None of the other 3 exposes user data, and each is a documented, accepted risk.
No stored secrets
The server keeps only a hash of each token. Revoking one in the app takes effect at once.
Two ways in
A token made in the app for developer tools, or a sign-in flow for Claude on the web, desktop and phone.

On the home screen

The widget shows the day's five and the streak without opening the app. A tick on the widget is saved straight away, then synced to the cloud in the background.

The home screen widget, with the day's list and the streak.

How we built it

Every release runs the same loop.

The release loop: plan, build, contract tests, simulator run, CI build, store review, users, and back to plan. Plans and code live in the repo.
The plan for each change is written into the repo first, so every release starts from it. The figure scrolls sideways.
The plan lives in the repo
Each change starts as a written plan beside the code.
It tests like a person
Each release runs through real journeys in the iOS simulator, such as sign-up and winning a day. The checks read the database, email and analytics directly, not the screens.
A signed build for the store
Codemagic builds and signs the iOS app on its own machine and sends it to TestFlight for the store.

Launch

The app is listed on the App Store and Google Play as Win the Day: Daily Discipline. In July, Apple rejected two submissions in a row. We traced the cause through the RevenueCat API and a simulator run. Subscriptions that Apple had not yet approved were hidden from the paywall, so the build looked as if it had none. Sending the build and the subscriptions together fixed it.

The website at wintheday.valetech.ca carries the method, the pricing and the sign-up for the web app.

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