Why I Built an Ad-Free Alternative to Untappd

为什么我开发了一个无广告的 Untappd 替代品

I’ve used Untappd for years to log the beers I drink. It works. It also drives me a little crazy every time I open it. Between the ads wedged into my feed, the check-in pressure that makes logging a beer feel like a social performance, and an interface that’s accumulated more features than I’ve ever asked for, opening the app to do one simple thing — “I liked this beer, I want to remember it” — started to feel like more work than it should be. So a few weeks ago, I decided to build my own.

多年来，我一直使用 Untappd 来记录我喝过的啤酒。它确实好用，但每次打开它时，它也让我感到有些抓狂。充斥在信息流中的广告、那种让记录啤酒变成一种社交表演的“打卡压力”，以及堆砌了太多我根本不需要的功能的界面，使得我打开这个应用去完成一件简单的事情——“我喜欢这款啤酒，我想记住它”——变得比预想中要繁琐得多。因此，几周前，我决定自己开发一个。

The idea: Letterboxd, but for beer. If you haven’t used Letterboxd, it’s a film-logging app that took a genre Untappd basically also occupies — “social logging app for a hobby” — and did it with a fraction of the clutter. Clean, fast, personal-journal-first, social-second. That’s the model I wanted for beer. I called it HopLog. The pitch, in one sentence: log what you drink, remember what you liked, discover something new — without ads, without check-in pressure, without a hundred features you’ll never touch.

我的构想是：啤酒界的 Letterboxd。如果你没用过 Letterboxd，它是一款电影记录应用，它切入了与 Untappd 基本相同的领域——“爱好类社交记录应用”——但它去除了大部分冗余。简洁、快速、以个人日记为主，社交为辅。这就是我想要的啤酒应用模式。我把它命名为 HopLog。用一句话来推介它：记录你喝过的酒，记住你喜欢的口味，发现新事物——没有广告，没有打卡压力，也没有一百个你永远不会用到的功能。

Building it like an actual product, not just a weekend hack. I didn’t want to just start writing code and see what happened. Before a single line was written, I worked through the process a real product team would use: A product requirements doc — what’s actually in scope for a first version, and just as importantly, what’s not; User personas — who is this actually for? (Turns out: the casual drinker who wants a nice photo journal, the homebrewer who wants precise tasting notes, and the traveler hunting for good local breweries — three genuinely different people with different needs); User stories, wireframes, a database schema, an API design, and a milestone-by-milestone roadmap.

像打造真正的产品一样去构建它，而不是仅仅当作周末的业余项目。我不想只是盲目地开始写代码然后走一步看一步。在写下第一行代码之前，我遵循了专业产品团队的工作流程：编写产品需求文档（明确第一版本包含什么，以及同样重要的——不包含什么）；定义用户画像（这到底是为谁设计的？结果发现：想要精美照片日记的休闲饮酒者、想要精确品鉴记录的自酿爱好者，以及寻找当地优质酒厂的旅行者——这是三类需求截然不同的用户）；以及用户故事、线框图、数据库架构、API 设计和分阶段的路线图。

Only after all of that did I start building — six milestones, one at a time, each one tested and verified before moving to the next: authentication, a real beer/brewery database, the actual tasting-logging flow, profiles with stats and badges, a social layer with feeds and follows, and finally search polish plus the unglamorous-but-necessary stuff like rate limiting and error monitoring.

在完成这一切之后，我才开始开发——共六个里程碑，一个接一个地进行，每一个在进入下一个阶段前都经过了测试和验证：身份验证、真实的啤酒/酒厂数据库、实际的品鉴记录流程、带有统计和徽章的个人资料页、包含信息流和关注功能的社交层，最后是搜索优化以及诸如速率限制和错误监控等虽然枯燥但必不可少的工作。

The look matters more than I expected. One thing I was deliberate about: HopLog does not look like a generic app template. It has its own identity — I think of it as “taproom chalkboard”: a warm, dim palette (deep malt-brown, not flat black), an amber accent that’s meant to evoke light through a glass of beer, a serif display font that feels a little hand-lettered, paired with clean, legible body text. It sounds like a small thing. But part of what makes Untappd feel tiring to me is that it doesn’t feel like anything anymore — it feels like software. I wanted HopLog to feel like a place, the way a well-lit bar at night feels like a place.

外观比我预想的更重要。我刻意追求的一点是：HopLog 看起来不像是一个通用的应用模板。它有自己的个性——我将其定义为“酒馆黑板风格”：温暖、柔和的色调（深麦芽棕色，而不是死板的黑色），旨在唤起光线穿过啤酒杯感的琥珀色点缀，带有手写感的衬线标题字体，搭配清晰易读的正文。这听起来是件小事。但 Untappd 让我感到疲惫的部分原因在于，它已经失去了个性——它感觉就像冷冰冰的软件。我希望 HopLog 能给人一种“空间感”，就像夜晚灯光温馨的酒吧那样。

The honest hard part. I’ll be straightforward about the thing that actually worries me: data. Untappd’s real advantage isn’t its interface — it’s fifteen-plus years of crowdsourced beers, breweries, and reviews. That’s an enormous head start that good design alone doesn’t overcome. Right now HopLog’s database is small, seeded from public brewery data plus whatever people add themselves. So I’m not pretending this is going to dethrone Untappd. What I do think is realistic: a smaller, genuinely devoted niche — people who specifically want something calmer and cleaner, the same way some people specifically prefer Letterboxd’s smaller community over IMDb’s.

最难的部分。我直言不讳地谈谈真正让我担心的事情：数据。Untappd 真正的优势不在于界面，而在于它十五年多来众包积累的啤酒、酒厂和评论数据。这是一个巨大的领先优势，仅靠优秀的设计是无法超越的。目前 HopLog 的数据库还很小，数据源自公开的酒厂信息以及用户自发添加的内容。所以我并不奢望它能取代 Untappd。但我认为现实的目标是：服务一个规模较小、真正忠诚的利基市场——那些特别想要一个更安静、更简洁环境的用户，就像有些人比起 IMDb 更喜欢 Letterboxd 的小众社区一样。

Try it. HopLog is live at hoplog-web.vercel.app — the link goes straight to a real landing page, not a login wall, so you can see what it’s about before deciding to sign up. It’s free, it’s ad-free, and it always will be for the core logging experience — no check-in bloat, no algorithm feed you didn’t ask for, just a clean place to remember what you drank and whether you liked it. If you try it and something’s missing or annoying, I’d genuinely like to hear about it — this is very much a living, early project, built by one person who just wanted a better version of an app he already used every week.

试用一下。HopLog 现已上线：hoplog-web.vercel.app —— 该链接直接指向真实的落地页，而不是登录墙，因此你可以在决定注册前先了解它。它是免费的，无广告的，并且核心记录体验将永远保持免费——没有臃肿的打卡功能，没有你不需要的算法信息流，只有一个纯粹的地方让你记录喝过的酒以及是否喜欢它。如果你试用后发现缺少什么或有任何不便，我非常希望能听到你的反馈——这是一个处于早期阶段的活跃项目，由一个只想为自己每周使用的应用寻找更好替代品的人所开发。