Show your love for small businesses, independent creators, and small developer teams with these apps.

Mom-and-pop operations power our local economies. Buy from small creators in Etsy, discover independent Black-owned restaurants and eateries with EatOkra, and browse Everywhere Is Queer for nearby queer-owned businesses. Looking for deals? Scroll past the big chains in Groupon to find discounts from locals.

If you’re accustomed to reading astrology in short blurbs, Chani will be a revelation: Extensive horoscopes deliver insights based on your birth time and the current planetary positions. The app was cofounded by Sonya Passi and Chani Nicholas; you’ll hear Nicholas’ voice in the app’s weekly readings. Five percent of the company’s profits go toward supporting survivor communities.

Goran Ivašić and Anja Renko launched their coloring-book app Lake to help everyone express a little creativity. But they soon noticed folks were coming to it for another reason entirely. “We kept hearing, ‘This gets me through the day. This keeps my anxiety at bay,’ says Ivašić, Lake’s designer and cofounder. “The coloring experience was the vessel, but mindfulness was the soul of it.”

Drawing from the collections of museums and galleries around the world, DailyArt shares a new painting, ink drawing, woodcut, figurine, or other work—along with a charming, personal take on what makes it great. Art historian Zuzanna Stańska launched DailyArt in 2012, and to this day she selects and writes nearly all of the content. A team of volunteer writers and editors ensures the app is available in over 20 languages.

When Thomas Aquinas Nugraha Budi and Stephanie Yuan quit their day jobs to develop their mental-health app Finch—which features a “self-care pet” that you nurture by building healthy habits—they gave themselves a hard deadline. “The mindset was, we were going to take one year to build something meaningful,” Budi says. “We tried seven or eight versions until we got the app you see today, literally on the 11th of the 12 months we gave ourselves.”

Built by Raphael Cruzeiro and Pedro Marques, Tangerine is a mood-tracking, journaling, and habit-tracking app that launched in January 2020. Within days, hundreds of users were downloading the app—and writing to tell how useful Tangerine was in times of need.

Under My Roof helps inventory your belongings, track renovation projects, and keep records related to your home in a central place. Spouses Diane and Kevin Hamilton quit their full-time jobs to found their company, Binary Formations. “We would have regretted not trying to go and do something ourselves,” Kevin says. “That was our big decision: Would we regret failing more or not trying more? And we decided we’d regret not trying more.”

Rootd founder Ania Wysocka first began experiencing panic attacks at university. “The whole concept of Rootd is to befriend your fear,” she says. “It’s to help you face it head-on and not be so afraid of it.” The app can help you understand the underlying causes of panic attacks—and guide you through them using latest techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

With 10-minute audio classes, Yoga Wake Up brings mindfulness to the first few moments of your day. Joaquín and Lizzie Brown created the app after experiencing the power of early morning yoga classes. “The instructor told us to lie down and pretend we were in bed,” Joaquín says. “I thought, ‘This could be how we wake up every day.’”

Tucker MacDonald’s childhood fishing trips with his grandfather inspired him to create Tide Guide. Since launching in 2018, it’s been an essential tool for the coast guard in Scotland, kayak tour leaders in the fjords of Alaska, and casual boaters alike. “One thing I’m most proud of is that you can instantly see the current conditions—but the more time you spend with it, the more you can dig into different layers for tides and marine weather,” MacDonald says.