By Ben Spanier, founder of UriVia Health Published April 2026
I want to tell you why this app exists, because I think you deserve to know who you're handing your bathroom data to.
About eighteen months ago, on a regular weekday morning, I noticed bubbles in the toilet. Not the splash kind that go away. The kind that sit there for a while and then slowly, stubbornly, dissolve. I'd had a cousin go through kidney trouble a few years earlier. So I did what most people do — I picked up my phone and Googled it.
Twenty minutes later, I had read enough WebMD pages to convince myself I either had nothing wrong or I had everything wrong. The internet, it turns out, is not designed to answer the question "should I be worried about this." It's designed to keep you reading.
I went to my doctor. She did a urine test, told me my kidneys were fine, said the foam was probably from how the toilet was flushing. She also said something that stuck with me: "If you'd been paying attention to your urine for a couple of weeks, we'd have a much clearer picture than one snapshot today."
The gap I kept noticing
That visit set me thinking. There's a category of health information your body shows you every single day, for free, with no equipment — your urine color, the way it foams, how often you go, how it smells. And almost nobody pays attention to it, because almost nobody knows how to read it.
Doctors will tell you it matters. Nephrologists will tell you it's one of the cheapest, earliest, most useful daily signals you have, especially if you have diabetes, are on a GLP-1, or have any kind of kidney risk. But there was no calm way to track it.
The options I found were:
- Health apps that wanted my full medical history, an account, an email, and a subscription before letting me log a single thing
- Test strips that work fine in a lab but degrade in a bathroom drawer and cost a few dollars per use
- Forums full of well-meaning strangers diagnosing themselves with terminal conditions in real time
- Notebooks, which work, but which nobody actually keeps for more than three days
None of these matched what I actually wanted, which was: open my phone, take five seconds to note the color, get a quiet "looking normal" or "worth watching" back, and move on with my day.
What I decided not to do
I'm a software developer. The temptation, when you're a software developer with a problem, is to build a thing that does everything. I deliberately decided not to.
UriVia is not a diagnostic tool. It will never tell you that you have kidney disease, or diabetes, or anything else. That's not a marketing softening — that's a hard rule baked into the app's logic. The risk levels are labelled with phrases like "looking normal," "drink water," and "worth watching." If something looks unusual for several days, the app will suggest you mention it at your next appointment. That's the ceiling.
I made this decision early because I'd watched too many wellness apps slide into the gap between "informational" and "medical advice" and create real harm — either by terrifying users into ER visits they didn't need, or by reassuring users when they should have called a doctor. I didn't want to be either of those things.
The privacy decision
The other early decision was where your data lives. The default for every health app I looked at was: your data goes to their servers, gets analyzed for "insights," sometimes gets shared with "partners," and you sign a long privacy policy you don't read.
UriVia stores your scans on your phone. Not on a cloud account. Not on a server I run. On your phone. The only thing that leaves your device is when you choose to ask the AI advisor a question, and even then, the request goes through a privacy-protecting proxy that doesn't store anything either.
This is not a marketing position. It's how the app is actually built. There is no user account, no email required, no analytics on your scans, no advertising profile. If your phone falls in the toilet, your scan history goes with it. That's the trade-off. I think it's the right one.
Who this is actually for
UriVia is most useful if you fall into one of these groups:
- You're on a GLP-1 medication (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound) and your appetite — including thirst — is suppressed
- You have type 2 diabetes and your doctor has mentioned protecting your kidneys
- You have early-stage CKD and want a daily signal between appointments
- You're a caregiver for a parent or grandparent who has trouble describing what's "different" today
- You're just someone who notices things about your body and wants a calmer way to keep track
If you're none of those things and you just want to know whether you're hydrated, the app still works fine. But it was built with the first group in mind, and most of the design decisions were optimised for "I have something specific to watch and I don't want to think about it more than I have to."
What's next
The app is in TestFlight as of writing, with public launch a few weeks out. The blog is where I'll write about hydration, kidney health, GLP-1 side effects, and the boring but useful science of urine — without the "10 SIGNS YOU'RE DYING" framing that dominates this corner of the internet.
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading. The waitlist sign-up on the home page gets you early access and a discount, but more importantly, it puts you on a short list of people I'll write to directly when something meaningful changes.
If you have a story like the bubbles-in-the-toilet one — something your body did, that you couldn't get a calm answer about — I'd genuinely like to hear it. The email is on the support page.
— Ben