Knitting PDF viewer with row/repeat tracking
Problem
Knitters and crocheters working from PDF patterns juggle a PDF viewer, a separate row counter, a repeat counter, and handwritten notes — losing their exact place every time they close the app. For patterns that repeat rows 1-8 six times, losing count means unraveling hours of work.
Opportunity
A pattern viewer that opens any existing PDF, lets you drop a movable marker on the current instruction, and saves page + marker + row counter + repeat counter + notes together as one restore point, offline, no pattern upload required.
Market analysis
My Row Counter already covers most of this — PDF import, multiple counters, notes, drawing on the pattern — and Knit Companion owns the power-user tier, so the proposal is a UX refinement of shipped software rather than an open gap.
Market · Knitters and crocheters working from purchased PDF patterns; an active hobby community with its own forums and app-recommendation threads.
Pricing · Freemium with a low one-time unlock (~$12 observed for My Row Counter's upgrade); the niche pays small amounts once, rarely subscribes.
Pros
- + Passionate niche with observed willingness to pay for quality-of-life upgrades.
- + Offline, no-upload requirement fits how crafters treat purchased patterns.
- + The unified restore point (page + marker + counters + notes as one snapshot) is a genuinely sharper mental model than loose counters.
Cons
- − My Row Counter already imports PDFs, tracks repeats, and supports notes and on-PDF markup.
- − Knit Companion sets a deep feature bar for pattern markup that is expensive to match.
- − Hobby utilities face hard revenue ceilings in a one-time-purchase culture.
Existing / similar tools
Source
r/SomebodyMakeThis (Reddit)
Reading the App Store reviews of My Row Counter is instructive: what users rave about is not the counters but “having my pattern right there with my notes” — the consolidation this idea correctly identifies as the product. The wedge that incumbents leave open is the restore point as a first-class object: one tap that snapshots page, marker, all counters and notes, so closing the app mid-repeat carries zero anxiety. If pursuing this, market exclusively through Ravelry-adjacent communities where a single well-received post can carry a hobby app, and resist the gravitational pull toward chart generation — that is a different, much harder product that would sink the timeline.