Chips belong to the fellowships. Milestones belong to you.

The first version of our shop sold recovery chips. It seemed obvious. Somebody hits ninety days, you hand them a thing they can hold. That ritual is older than any of us and it works.

We stopped for two reasons. One was legal and boring. The other changed how we think about milestones entirely.

The boring reason

Chips and medallions are the fellowships' own. The designs, the wording, the traditions around who hands one to whom — those belong to the programs that built them, and several are protected marks sold to fund the fellowships themselves. A company selling lookalikes is, at best, taking money that should be going to a service structure. At worst it's trading on somebody else's name.

We didn't want a lawyer's opinion on where the line was. We wanted to not be near it.

The better reason

Once we stopped trying to make a chip, we noticed the thing a chip can't do: it can't be program-agnostic.

12Gradus supports all thirty-three twelve-step fellowships. A gambler counts days. So does someone in AA, NA, OA, SLAA, Al-Anon, and two dozen others — and each of those has its own colours, its own words, its own customs about what a given anniversary means. Any single physical token we made would be right for one fellowship and slightly wrong for the rest.

So we made something that doesn't belong to any of them: Days of Freedom.

Thirty days. Sixty. Ninety. Six months, nine months, a year, eighteen months, two years, then one for every year after. No program name, no fellowship logo, no borrowed language. Just the count and a sunrise over water — the same wave that's in our logo, because the thing about a wave is that there's always another one and you're still standing.

Why a magnet

This was the part we argued about.

A chip lives in a pocket. That's the point of it — a thing to reach for when your hand needs something to do. But a pocket is also private, and a lot of milestones are quietly private on purpose.

A magnet lives on a fridge. And a fridge is the most-visited surface in a house. Somebody's kid sees it. Their partner sees it. They see it, at 6am, before they've decided what kind of day it's going to be.

It's a small, dumb, physical fact: the thing you see every morning is the thing you believe. A magnet gets seen every morning.

They're 3-inch die-cut, printed on demand, ten dollars. That price is close to what it costs us to make and ship one — this isn't a margin business, it's a there should be a thing to hold business.

The milestone flag

Flag a sponsee and 12Gradus tells you a week before each milestone lands, with the magnet one tap from ordered. We built that because the gap between "I should send them something" and actually sending it is where most good intentions die, and a week is enough lead time to close it.

Two things about where this is going, because they matter:

• Sending it for you is next, and the sponsee's address stays theirs. Today the gift is ordered by hand, so it ships to whatever address is typed at checkout. In the automatic version the parcel is addressed from the sponsee's own profile, straight to the printer — a sponsor never sees it. We'd rather say that plainly than let you assume it already works that way.
• It's a gift, not a reward. Nothing is unlocked, no streak breaks, nothing is taken away on a reset. A reset resets the date. It never resets the relationship, and it never resets what somebody already earned.

About resets

Since we're here: the counter in 12Gradus can be set back, and setting it back is a normal, unremarkable action that produces no red screens, no lost history, and no notification to anyone who wasn't already in the loop.

We thought hard about this. Software has a habit of turning a hard human moment into a punishment — the broken streak, the sad graphic, the you've lost your progress. A person setting their date back is having one of the worst days of their year. The software's entire job in that moment is to be unremarkable, and then to be there tomorrow when the count starts again at one.

One day at a time is not a slogan we borrowed for marketing. It's a design constraint.