Hi and welcome to the development blog of Tomás, a recession-inspired finance software for home expense management and forecasting.
I’d like to use this space to share insights into the development process, the whys and how, and in general to share the journey.
Complex economic times
flowchart LR
A("Get into economic problems")
A --> B("...")
B --> C("Success!")
At the end of 2022, my first child was born. We were extremely prepared for him, but what we weren’t ready for was my father losing almost all of his liver function. This put the entire family into a position of having to fix years of financial neglect, and forced our nuclear family to acquire debt.
As you can imagine, the economic turmoil that followed wasn’t kind to my partner and me. She eventually lost her job, I lost mine, I got another one, she didn’t, and after a few months in this situation, the enormous debt from my father’s issues put us in a position where tracking expenses became crucial—not just for the present, but to forecast our recovery and anticipate future expenses.
Temporary solutions
Of course, the first instinct was to get an expense tracking app, but those are only good for… well, expense tracking. I’d already tried dozens of them throughout my life, so that wasn’t going to cut it.
Instead, we started making detailed spreadsheets. They were good for one-time analysis but always left unaccounted details that would surprise us months later. Still, I pushed through and created pretty advanced ones capable of predicting months ahead, with rolling balances, recurring expenses, and even projections showing how interest-free purchases would affect our monthly credit balance.
The problem was expense tracking itself—it wasn’t user-friendly. You had to input transactions in a separate sheet, and in general, it went unused except for occasional static analyses.
Enter the Full Calendar
Around this time, I starting playing with the idea that the ideal method for capturing, organizing, and forecasting would be a calendar. You add transactions on the day they will happen, and if you know you need to pay your loan every 1st and 15th of the month, you can get ahead of it and add all future payments along with your food budget and fixed income.
Just like adding events to a calendar, but instead of events, they’re transactions.
I fired up VS Code, got a Copilot subscription, and started vibe coding to see if it actually felt right.
¡It did! I got an implementation of Full Calendar connected to the Web SQL API (basically SQLite) working in a couple of hours. A working form to add transactions came the next hour, and the simplest queries were already giving me the summarized information I expected just minutes later.
I moved all the information that took hours to capture and analyze from my spreadsheet into the system in 15 minutes… And there it was in all its glory: A 12-month forecast.
Yes, the calendar is the perfect entry method for forecasting, transaction entry, and visualizing your finances long term.
Copilot (with Claude behind it) is really good at making UIs, especially if you choose something common like Bootstrap. No shame here. I’m not going for style points; I just wanted to regain control of my finances.
Now What?
That was the question in the back of my mind as I effortlessly added small features whenever something felt wrong or repetitive while managing my finances. This looks cool and useful—surely more people should be able to use it… but how?
My first approach was modest: make it an app you can run on your local server so all relevant family members can help. So I moved it from a browser database to my personal computer, converted all the functions to API calls instead of front-end functions, and called it a day.
But I forgot to keep my computer on, so my partner couldn’t log in when she wanted to help, and I constantly forgot to add expenses.
That was a failure. Let’s move it to the cloud then. I have a server to host my projects and I’m pretty good at writing CI pipelines… but now there’s a problem: I’m not going to leave my finances on a server that anyone could access. At this point, I was so focused on adding new features that I’d forgotten to include a user system.
It was around this time, while chatting with an old friend, that I told him about the project. Not knowing that I only wanted to fix my finances, he congratulated me on creating SaaS software that could really bring money to the table.
Honestly, I’d never thought about that, but it actually made sense. I should turn this into a SaaS.
The big refactor
Moving from personal software to SaaS means tons of changes. I entered a huge refactor phase that took 3 months. I’ll talk about that in the next update—hopefully by then we’ll be ready to start the closed beta and you’ll be able to get a taste of the software.
PS: I didn’t realize we were making recession software until 4 months into development, when Reels and TikToks started talking about recession signs like women going back to their natural hair color or pizza being financed in monthly payments.
But yeah, this is totally recession software.
PPS: My partner, a frontend extraordinaire, still hasn’t found a job. If you know of something, please let us know.
Love,
Levhita