Plot
A movie and TV companion app for tracking what you watch, keeping a watchlist and deciding what to watch next.
Plot is a warm, daylight companion for everything you've watched and everything you want to watch. It's built by one person, around a full-time job, with no team, investors or ads.
Visit Plot ↗
The problem
Before Plot, the watchlist was a note on a phone, reviews were texts to friends, and release dates were whatever could be remembered.
The apps that existed were clunky, mostly dark-mode only and not much fun to look at, and they came with pressure to write a performative review. Deciding what to watch still meant searching every streaming service one by one.
The joy of watching, minus the performance of it.
Who it is for
People who love movies and TV and don't need a word for it. You don't have to call yourself a cinephile to belong.
Plot keeps movies and TV together in one app, keeps reviews short on purpose, and puts the focus on what to watch next: a release calendar, where to watch, and a daily What's On guide.
Savannah Black's role
Savannah Black founded Plot through Susumu House and is its only builder, owning the product, brand, design, engineering, launch and operations. About 97% of the 1,620 commits since March 2026 are Savannah's; the rest come from dependency and release bots.
The work was done around a full-time job, with AI coding assistants as pair programmers throughout.
Key decisions and trade-offs
Taken from the launch plan, the architecture notes and the decision records in the repo.
Keep the web app live during the mobile build
The first plan took Plot offline behind a splash page while the iOS app was built. It was withdrawn once new sign-ups showed the web app had started to work as a channel. Going dark would have switched that channel off, and it would only have delayed finding problems rather than making risky changes safe.
No social feed
Profiles are the social surface, report and block ship from day one, and share cards are the growth loop. Share cards are owner-only and open in a modal rather than a public page, because your history is yours.
iOS first, Android later
The first native release is iPhone only. Android comes after.
Notifications that earn their place
Push notifications are scoped to watchlist availability alerts only.
Short reviews on purpose
Reviews have a character cap, so you log a feeling instead of writing an essay.
Funded by Premium, nothing else
No investors and no ads. Tracking, the watchlist, the release calendar and imports stay free; Premium adds unlimited lists, a live calendar subscription and Just Decide, at US$3 a month or US$24 a year, set in September 2026.
One core for web and mobile
Shared logic lives in a single core package used by both apps, so the web and iOS versions cannot drift apart.
What was built
Three apps on one shared core: the web app at app.theplot.tv, the marketing site at theplot.tv, and an iOS app built with Expo and React Native.
- Tracking, ratings and a watchlist for films and TV, with episode ratings
- A release calendar, a daily What's On guide and where-to-watch information
- Just Decide, a picker that answers what to watch tonight
- Watch together and taste overlap, to find something to watch with a friend
- Smart lists, collaborative lists and per-list visibility
- Streaming, new-episode and watchlist alerts
- Imports from Letterboxd, Trakt, IMDb, Plex, TV Time and Simkl
- Share cards, themes and a customisable home screen
- A Supabase backend with 173 migrations and 39 edge functions, hosted on Cloudflare, with CI that runs unit, smoke and visual snapshot tests plus scheduled backups
Outcomes
- The web app is live with real users
- Three public releases on the changelog, reaching version 1.0.0 on 22 October 2026
- 1,620 commits in seven months, built solo
- The iOS app is at 1.0.0 and being prepared for the App Store
Lessons
Don't switch off a channel the moment it starts working. The plan to take Plot offline looked almost free until acquisition was checked.
Shipping a risky change to a live product surfaces problems in days rather than at a cold launch. Going dark delays discovery; it does not make the work safe.
Screens
The web app and the iOS app, captured from test accounts.
Movie and TV images in these screenshots are from TMDB and belong to their respective owners. Plot uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Identity
A lowercase wordmark with the foot of the l swept into the o, a five-dot P for the app icon, and a palette that is warm, flat and quiet.
