Hey, I’m Ruben, the developer behind Snug. I have about four years of experience as a software developer. Mostly focused on scheduling software.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn 🙂
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruben-heeren-7232b3213
This post is really just the story of how Snug came to be, starting with the app fatigue that led to it.
I’ve been through the whole productivity app cycle trying to find one that actually works for me.
Started with Notion. Built a “second brain.” Spent weeks organizing everything perfectly – color-coded databases, linked pages, the works. It looked incredible. It also required a 20-minute setup ritual just to log a grocery run. Turns out the app was more productive than I was.
If everything is in that nested page setup style, I tend to lose track of it all.
Moved to Todoist. Liked it for a while. Then they introduced that thing where you type “mar 11” and it automatically turns it into a recurring task. Small thing, but it drove me crazy. I just want to type what I mean without the app guessing.
Google Calendar + Google Tasks was next. Worked okay for me solo, but try assigning tasks to someone else. Or making a recurring task with subtasks. It falls apart pretty quickly.
Since I work on scheduling software for a living, I had a decent sense of what tends to go wrong, and what matters most when you’re trying to keep a schedule of multiple people in sync.
I’m based in Belgium, with a girlfriend in Asia. Coordinating across timezones with people in different countries – figuring out visas, planning holidays, staying on top of shared tasks. I needed something that didn’t feel like managing a Jira board.
Every app I tried was either too simple (just a shared list) or too complex (25 sidebar items, 40 settings, premium tier for basic features). Nothing hit the middle ground.
Building a planner that doesn’t overwhelm
So I built Snug.
On top of the reasons mentioned earlier this article, it was also a chance to push my skills and take Claude Code for a serious test ride (we’re talking late 2025 early 2026 here).
It’s a productivity booster, though I’d add that without a software engineering background, it can write code that looks solid on the surface but hides bugs you won’t catch until much later.
Anyway, here’s Snug. It has the stuff you’d expect: shared calendars, recurring tasks, reminders, projects, to-dos, files, but it doesn’t overwhelm you with features.
There is no steep learning curve. No corporate feel. It’s meant to feel like a family organizer, not a project management tool.
That’s why Snug exists. If you’ve tried a bunch of apps and nothing hit the spot, and if you like pastel colors, maybe give it a try.