This Couple's App Helped 10,000 Women Get Pregnant And They Say It Can Replace Birth Control Too

Want to get pregnant? There's an app for that ... actually a few apps for that. And they are proving to be remarkably helpful.

Want to avoid pregnancy? Kindara, an iPhone app created by a husband and wife team in Boulder, Colo., promises that it can be your birth control, too, letting women get off the pill.

While it's hard to track how many women avoided pregnancy with Kindara, in the last year alone, the app has helped 10,000 women conceive, co-founder William Sacks tells Business Insider.

Users are reporting nearly 500 pregnancies per week, he says.

Kindara pe-dates another app in this category called Glow, built by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and launched last summer. After its first four months, Glow said it helped 1,000 women get pregnant.

Kindara was released in 2012 to do a similar thing. But, unlike Glow, its founders say this app can now not only help a woman conceive, but also avoid pregnancy while allowing women to get off of hormone-based birth control like the pill, patch or ring.

Women input intimate details about their bodies and the app tells them if they are ovulating. Have sex around that time to get pregnant. Don't have sex around that time to avoid pregnancy.

Sacks answered a few questions about the app for us:

Business Insider: Did you create this app because you were having trouble starting a family?

William Sacks: We actually founded the company because we were looking for effective birth control that wasn't the pill. Kati had been on the pill for 10 years and she didn't like the side effects. She introduced me to the fertility awareness method and I was blown away by how little I understood about female fertility. I was actually outraged that I had never been taught how reproduction actually works.

Once we started tracking her fertility signs I learned all about how her body worked and also discovered an added intimacy in our relationship. We wanted to share this with other couples, so we started Kindara out of our own desire to give women and men tools that help them take control of their health, understand what's happening with their bodies and meet their fertility goals.

BI: Are you advocating that women who do not want to get pregnant do not use birth control and use fertility awareness instead?

WS: No. We want every woman to use the birth control that is right for her. What we do want is for every woman to know that Fertility Awareness is an effective option whether they are trying to get pregnant, or want to effectively avoid pregnancy. It's really sad that millions of women suffer through the side effects of hormonal contraception or the stress of potential fertility problems and don't even know there are effective alternative options.

Kati and I have been using FA for 4 years now and we love it. And thousands of our users are using it to better understand what's happening with their bodies so they can get pregnant or at least understand why they aren't getting pregnant and share that info with their doctors. We've helped women identify hormone problems, thyroid problems, which in turn has helped them and their doctors figure out next steps.

BI: How do you know that that your app has helped with 10,000 pregnancies?

This stat comes from self-reported data from our community of users over the last 12 months. It's only self-reported pregnancies. Since March 1 2013.

BI: How does the app work?

WS: Currently women input the data themselves. But we're working on connected devices that will make it easier.