You can change your target later in a water intake counter, and a new preference applies only to days that have not yet received a cup — every saved day keeps the target you used when its first cup was recorded. The Water Intake Counter stores your chosen target alongside the first cup you save for a local calendar date, so an old day's progress is never silently rewritten by a decision you make today. This lock-by-first-cup behaviour matters because it keeps your history honest: if you set 8 cups as your personal plan on Monday and change to 6 cups on Friday, Monday through Thursday still display progress against 8 cups while Friday onward tracks the 6-cup target you chose at the moment of your first cup that Friday. The tool never edits a past day, never suggests a different number for you, and never converts cups into millilitres, so the history list shows exactly what you recorded when you recorded it.
How a Target Locks to the First Cup of a Day
The lock is intentional. The instant you press the button that saves your first cup for a given local calendar date, the target value sitting in the input field at that moment is written into that day's record. From then on, the cup count, the target, and the "goal reached" status for that date are frozen together. The tool never recomputes a past day's percentage against a target you typed later, because doing so would let a future preference quietly change the meaning of an earlier entry without you noticing.
Local calendar date is read from your device using the browser's Intl.DateTimeFormat behaviour, so a cup you log at 11:50 p.m. belongs to today and a cup you log five minutes later belongs to tomorrow. That boundary is what gives the target lock a stable anchor. The next morning the daily total resets to zero, but the previous day's saved target and cup count stay put in the history list. The list therefore reads as a chronological diary of choices, not as a present-tense label stamped over every old entry.
Setting and Adjusting Your Daily Cup Target
- Open the Water Intake Counter in your browser.
- Optionally type a short label — a word or two that helps you remember the plan behind the number, such as "weekdays" or "training week".
- Enter a whole number between 1 and 9,999 in the daily target field. Leave the field empty if you only want a plain cup count without a progress label.
- Press Add a cup each time you finish a cup. The screen shows today's running total, the target you chose, and whether the goal has been reached.
- Press Undo a cup to remove the most recent cup if a tap was accidental or a count was logged twice.
- To change the target for a future day, edit the target field on any morning before you log your first cup. To change today's target, delete the cups already saved for today, edit the field, and press Add a cup again — the new target will lock to today's record at that moment.
What Your History List Looks Like After a Change
Because each saved day's target is sealed at its first cup, the history list behaves like a ledger rather than a single rolling number. Each row shows the date, the cups you recorded, the target you chose for that day, and whether the goal was reached. If you started with 8 cups as your personal plan, switched to 6 midweek, then switched again to 10 on the weekend, the list shows three different targets in three different rows — exactly matching the cup totals you produced on those days.
| Day in your history | Cups you recorded | Target locked to that day | What the row shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 7 | 8 | 7 of 8 — not yet reached |
| Tuesday | 8 | 8 | 8 of 8 — reached |
| Friday | 6 | 6 | 6 of 6 — reached |
| Saturday | 9 | 10 | 9 of 10 — not yet reached |
For a single worked check, 9 cups against a 10-cup target gives 9 ÷ 10 × 100 = 90% of your personal target reached, exactly as the Saturday row reads. The percentage comes from the two values already on that row — your cup count and the target sealed with that day — and is never re-derived from a later preference.
Taking the Record Outside the Browser
If you want a file you can keep outside the current browser, the counter offers two local exports. Both are generated on this device from canvas and Blob APIs; no upload, account, or server-side conversion is involved, so the file you save contains only what is in your history.
| Export | File shape | Columns or layout | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| CSV | Plain comma-separated file | Date, Cups, Daily target cups, Goal reached — one row per saved nonzero day | Open the record in a spreadsheet, sort by date, or run your own analysis |
| PNG | 1080 by 1350 image | Total and recent day rows, no URL, no custom label | Paste a visual summary into a note, slide, or print |
The CSV is the right choice when durable, per-day data is the goal — each saved day keeps the target that was locked to it, so the file remains a faithful record even after you change your preference. The PNG is better for a quick shareable snapshot and intentionally leaves the typed label out so a visual summary carries less personal context.
Where the Target and Cups Actually Live
The target you type, the optional label, and the cup record sit in this browser's local storage under the key counter:water-intake-counter. They do not sync to a phone, a second computer, or an account, and clearing this site's browser data removes them. If the browser cannot preserve local storage for any reason, the page stays usable for the current session but tells you it cannot save a durable history. There is no hidden analytics request attached to the cup buttons, the undo button, or the export controls — every action runs locally.
This storage model is what makes changing the target feel safe to experiment with. You can try different daily numbers without the record silently mutating behind you, because nothing is sent to a server that could rewrite the history when your plan shifts. For readers who want to see how this cup-target approach compares with a neutral manual count that lets you pick any step size, the tally counter and click counter comparison lays out the differences in plain language.
What the Counter Will Not Tell You About Your Target
The target field is a personal label, not a recommendation. The tool does not calculate how much water you should drink, does not infer a number from your body weight or activity, does not diagnose hydration, does not convert cups to millilitres, and does not pull data from a wearable. A personal tally stays useful precisely because it does not pretend that one number fits every person, every climate, or every day. If you want a counter that knows nothing about cups and lets you pick any step size, the plain Online Tally Counter covers that case; if you want a named habit with a calendar streak, the Daily Habit Counter is a better fit.
Two practical limits are worth keeping in mind before you start changing targets mid-week. First, the target is a whole number from 1 to 9,999 cups — fractions and millilitre-style values are not part of the input. Second, because a day's target seals at the first cup, a target change you make late in the day only takes effect on the next local date unless you remove the cups already saved for today and re-add them. Both limits are the same trade-off that lets the history list remain an honest diary of what you actually chose and recorded on each local calendar day.