About Mello

I assumed this was a solved problem and that I had simply not found the right app. It is not solved.

The Royal Veterinary College built an app for exactly this, launched in 2016 and designed by a specialist in feline diabetes. It is still on the App Store. It was last updated in November 2017, and reviews left in 2025 describe the same unfixed bugs people reported in 2017. The other option most owners meet is a free tracker given out by an animal health company alongside its own insulin brand.

So the tool a lot of experienced owners actually use is a colour-coded spreadsheet, passed between strangers on a forum, with volunteers helping newcomers set it up. It works, which is the point. It is also 2026.

Two published findings shaped what I decided to build. When researchers asked 221 owners of insulin-treated diabetic cats what most affected their own quality of life, three of the top eight answers were about the same thing: the difficulty of leaving the animal with anyone else — boarding, a friend or family member, fitting it around work. Second on that list was simply wanting more control over the condition. Meanwhile UK primary-care records show that a diabetes diagnosis carries a genuinely poor prognosis, and that earlier, better-informed conversations between owner and vet are part of what changes it.

A shared record that another person can actually pick up is not a small feature. For a lot of households it is the whole problem.

Mello records what happened and when: glucose readings, insulin given and by whom, meals, weight, how your pet has seemed. It turns that into a chart and into a report you can hand to your vet, so an appointment starts from a record instead of from memory.

Mello will never calculate, suggest or imply an insulin dose. It will not tell you your pet's reading is fine, or that it is not. It will not interpret a glucose curve or offer a diagnosis. Those are veterinary decisions and they belong to your vet. Where Mello shows a reading against a range, that range is the one your vet gave you and that you entered — and where you have not entered one, Mello says so plainly rather than quietly substituting a number of its own.

Being clear about that boundary is not legal throat-clearing. It is the main design constraint on the whole product, and a good deal of what the app does not do is a direct result of it.

Mello is being built in the open and it is not finished. The app has not been released yet. The guides on this site draw on published veterinary sources, and thirteen of them were reviewed by a veterinary surgeon in October 2026, and the rest have not been. When that review happens, this page will say who did it and what they looked at. Until then I would rather tell you it has not happened than imply it has.

Things get taken down here when they turn out to be wrong. In October 2026 a set of tools and claims came off this site after an independent review, including a calculator that strayed too close to a dosing decision. That will keep happening, and the corrections page records it when it does.

If you are at the start of this, our guide for the newly diagnosed covers the first steps, what to ask your vet and what to have at home.

If you are managing this now and something here is wrong, missing or unhelpful, I would like to hear it. That feedback is the most useful thing anyone can give me at this stage.