Hey all — I’m an indie dev and longtime cyclist who got tired of guessing when my chain needed rewaxing. I’d either try to mentally track it or just wait until the drivetrain got sluggish and noisy.
So I built Chain Wax App, a simple iOS app that connects to Strava, pulls your bike mileage automatically, and tells you when it’s time to rewax. No manual logging, no spreadsheets.
Multiple bikes — tracks all your bikes from Strava separately
Wax distance presets — normal, extended, gravel, wet/muddy, and indoor trainer (since trainer miles are cleaner and stretch your wax further)
Custom wax distance — if you know your wax lasts exactly 280 miles or whatever, you can set that instead of using presets
Push notifications — after every Strava sync, you get a notification if your chain is due (added this recently based on user feedback)
It’s free, no ads, no subscription. I built it because I wanted it to exist.
I’d genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially from people putting in serious indoor hours. Is there anything you’d want from an app like this that it doesn’t do?
Just in case you’re unaware of it. ProBikeGarage has the ability to track wear on parts and I use it to track the number of hours on a chain waxing. I paid for the app a long time ago, so I’m not sure what the pricing is on it now and what all is available for free.
Thanks for mentioning ProBikeGarage — I was actually aware of it! Great app with a lot of depth. I wanted to build something lighter weight and more single-purpose. Just chain waxing, nothing else to configure. And it’s free, so easy to try out if anyone’s curious.
If you are tracking quick link usage, it’s a slippery slope (good or bad) to tracking things at the chain level as well as the bike level. Most of the cyclist I know who wax their chains have multiple chains in rotation so they don’t have to pull out the pot every time. Maybe not that valuable, but can be helpful to know how many miles are on each chain.
I do think if you are going to the trouble of doing the work of creating an app for chain wax intervals that it’s worth considering adding other maintenance items. I don’t need any reminder to keep on top of my chain swaps (they basically get swapped weekly), but I do get lazy/forgetful about other stuff. It’s much easier to forget to swap in new shifter or powermeter batteries because those can go weeks or months (even years with minimal use) between replacement. And they go dead with basically zero warning. Brake pads is another one that I often overlook longer than I should. I’m sure the app focused only on chain waxing is really valuable for folks who may not change them very often, just highlighting some other things that might be easy to add and bring value.
Really appreciate the thoughtful feedback. You’re right that it’s a slippery slope, in a good way, maybe. Multiple chains in rotation is a great point, and I can see how tracking miles per chain (not just per bike) would be useful for people running that setup.
The broader maintenance tracking is interesting too. Batteries and brake pads are exactly the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. I’ve been trying to keep the app focused, but I hear you, if I’m already hooked into Strava mileage, adding other interval-based reminders wouldn’t be a huge leap.
Definitely giving me stuff to think about. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
As a fellow software engineer, I think you should be careful not to duplicate ProBikeGarage (PBG). Tracking other parts is going down the road to duplicating PBG. You’d end up with a similar but “less than” app unless you’re going to build it out even more or make the user experience better (fwiw I think there’s room for improvement there). Your point about being strictly focused on chain waxing and keeping it simple is a good example of differentiation that might entice a user to use both apps.
As a user of PBG the areas for improvement with respect to waxing that I see are:
Tracking quick link usage (as previously mentioned). PBG doesn’t have a way to increment a use/cycle of a component. It tracks mileage, ride hours, or calendar time, but not re-installations or uses.
If you took the test results from zero friction cycling and baked that info into the app in some way so that when you “installed” a waxed chain it automatically populated with the predicted lifecycle for the given usage. PBG has a library of components and service intervals. You could build a library of waxes and their intervals.
Really solid advice, and I appreciate the perspective from both the engineering and user side.
You’re right that duplicating PBG would be a losing game. I’d rather stay focused and do one thing well. If people end up using both apps, that’s totally fine by me.
The quick link tracking keeps coming up, so clearly worth adding. And the Zero Friction Cycling idea is interesting. I’ll have to dig into their data and see if there’s a good way to incorporate it. Thanks!
I’m not sure what things you have available via strava. But if you are looking to get a bit fancy on determining wax intervals, there is a lot that can be done once you have the geolocation data from the ride. I used to work in the cargo security space and we could analyze a trip (historically and in real time) and tell you what type of road surface and the weather conditions that were occurring every minute of the trip (ie - ride). You could take that data, add in cadence and power, and whip up the fanciest automagic interval calculator on the planet. And then stick “Waxmaster AI” somewhere on it to get people really excited…. Not sure how big your aspirations are or if there is real value beyond just tracking miles, but all the stuff is really simple to pull together if you can find an API that works for you commercially (it’s easy to find the API’s, hard to find them for free). My main question would be how good the surface data is, most of the sources I’ve seen aren’t even good at determining pavement vs. dirt roads. But maybe worth looking into it. Weather and road surface can have a much bigger impact on wax degradation that just pure miles.
I downloaded this and it’s great. I added bikes to my Strava account. How do I classify which bike I was using for the ride? These days it’s all indoor, but I have two indoor bikes.
This is a really cool idea. You’re right that weather and road surface can impact wax life way more than miles alone. Strava’s API does provide GPS/route data, so in theory I could pull that and cross-reference with weather and surface APIs. Definitely something to this approach. As an initial pass I could just prompt the user for ride conditions after each ride and factor that in. Thanks for the idea!
Thanks! Glad you like it. In Strava, you can set a bike’s “Default Sport” to “Virtual Ride” under your gear settings, and Strava will automatically assign indoor rides to that bike. If you have two indoor bikes though, Strava might not always pick the right one, so you may need to manually edit the ride in Strava and assign the correct bike.
Yep, technically it’s just tracking distance since last “reset”. So you could use it for any distance-based maintenance. There’s even a custom interval option if the presets don’t fit your use case.