Hippo
Hippo is a personal CRM for organizing notes, events, reminders, and to-dos about friends, family, and colleagues.
What Hippo is
Hippo is a personal CRM for organizing notes, events, reminders, and to-dos about friends, family, and colleagues. Contact profiles can store details such as children’s names, new jobs, holiday plans, and gift ideas. Users can create meetings and life-event entries, receive follow-up reminders, and link contacts to show relationships. Optional calendar integration can suggest events and import calendar entries. Siri and Shortcuts support adding notes, reminders, and events, searching, and other actions. Data remains on the device, with optional syncing through the user’s private iCloud Drive. The maker says Hippo has no servers and cannot see, read, analyze, change, or delete app data. Limited anonymized screen-type tracking can be disabled in the app. Hippo supports Face ID, Touch ID, or a device passcode through iOS 18 app lock. It runs on iOS and macOS, requires recent operating-system versions, and offers yearly and lifetime purchases after a trial limited to 25 contacts.
Good
- Contact notes for personal details
- Events and follow-up reminders
- Optional private iCloud Drive sync
- Siri and Shortcuts support
- Face ID, Touch ID, or passcode lock
Watch out
- No free plan
- Trial limited to 25 contacts
- Requires iOS, iPadOS, or macOS versions listed
- Yearly plan costs $14.99 a year
Who it suits
Hippo suits people who want structured relationship notes and reminders while keeping app data on their devices. It is aimed at users of supported iOS and macOS versions who value private storage.
Verdict
Hippo combines relationship tracking, reminders, calendar support, and device-based storage for Apple users. Its 25-contact trial limit and required operating-system versions should be checked before purchase.
Plans and prices
From Hippo's own pricing page, checked 21 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial | Free | up to 25 contacts · 1 month |
| Monthly | $1.99 a month | full app after trial · $1.99 per month |
| Yearly | $14.99 a year | full app after trial · $14.99 per year |
| Lifetime | $29.99, paid once | full app after trial · $29.99 one-time purchase |
The facts
Each one read from Hippo's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- Account requirement
- Hippo does not require an account, email address or password.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Analytics
- The privacy policy says usage tracking is limited and anonymized, records screen types rather than content, and can be disabled in settings.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Audience
- Hippo is built for people who want to be more attentive without giving up privacy.checked 9 Oct 2026
- Automation
- Hippo supports Siri and Shortcuts for adding notes, reminders, and events, searching, and other actions.checked 9 Oct 2026
- Calendar integration
- Users can optionally use calendar data to suggest events and import calendar events into Hippo.checked 9 Oct 2026
- Contacts permission
- The app works without Contacts permission, and imported contacts remain on the device.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Data access
- The maker says Hippo has no servers and cannot see, read, analyze, change, or delete users' app data.checked 9 Oct 2026
- Documentation and support
- The support center contains getting-started, subscriptions, synchronization and tips articles, including contact import, notes, events, reminders and relationships.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Events
- Users can create events for meetings and important life moments and receive reminders.checked 9 Oct 2026
- Extensibility
- Version 2.1 added Siri actions and Shortcuts support for adding notes, reminders and events, opening contacts, viewing Today or Upcoming and searching Hippo.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: birthdays
- A birthday field reminds users to congratulate contacts and shows their age.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: calendar integration
- Hippo can display and import events from Apple Calendar and let users choose which calendars appear.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: contact import
- Contacts can be imported selectively from the device address book or added manually.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: events
- Users can create events for meetings or life events and receive reminders when they occur.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: iCloud sync
- Optional sync and backup use the user's private iCloud Drive across Apple devices.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: notes
- Users can attach notes such as family details, jobs, holidays and gift ideas to contacts.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: relationships
- Contacts can be linked with relationship types such as parent, spouse, colleague, friend or custom labels, with reciprocal labels shown automatically.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Feature: reminders
- Reminders store questions or follow-up items to address when meeting a contact.checked 21 Oct 2026
- License statement
- The terms say Hippo materials are protected by applicable copyright and trademark law.checked 21 Oct 2026
Where it runs
- App lock
- Hippo can be locked with Face ID, Touch ID, or the device passcode using the built-in iOS 18 app-lock feature.checked 9 Oct 2026
- Limit: App Store reliability complaint
- One reviewer reported crashes, inability to reorder reminders and reliance on manually entered information beyond birthdays; the developer replied that crashes and reminder sorting were fixed.checked 21 Oct 2026
- Limit: platform scope
- Lemlist says Hippo works only on iPhone and lacks advanced automation and workflow features.checked 21 Oct 2026
The company
- Company location
- Roel van der Kraan describes himself as a UX/UI designer based in the Netherlands and identifies Hippo as his side project.checked 21 Oct 2026
Money
- Limit: cost and manual entry
- The Stanford report criticized the $1.99 monthly fee as reducing accessibility and said substantial manual data entry makes the app high-maintenance.checked 21 Oct 2026
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