A paper-and-Excel headache, replaced by an app 100,000 people use

The situation

In Bangladesh, millions of people live in shared households — students, workers, families splitting a home. Someone has to be the manager: track who ate which meals, what the groceries cost, who paid what, and who owes whom at the end of the month.

Almost everyone did this on paper or in a spreadsheet. It took hours every month, it was easy to get wrong, and getting it wrong caused arguments about money between people who live together.

This was a real, boring, everyday problem affecting a huge number of people — and nobody had built a proper product for it.

What I built

An app that takes the whole job off the manager’s hands:

• Automatic meal tracking. Members record their own meals. No more chasing people.
• Shared cost splitting. Groceries and bills are entered once and divided correctly.
• Month-end statements. A clear PDF showing exactly what each person owes. The thing that used to take an evening now takes a tap.
• A group chat built in, so the household can sort things out without leaving the app.

The whole product — the phone app, the website and the admin tools — is one system I designed, built and continue to run.

The result

• Past 100,000 downloads on the Play Store.
• Replaced a multi-hour monthly chore with something automatic.
• Still running and still growing, six years after launch, with no team behind it.

For a client, the relevant part is this: I have run a real product in front of real users for years. I know what breaks after launch, because I have been the person who had to fix it.

How it was built

A React Native app for Android and iOS, with the website and admin panel sharing code in a single repository so a fix lands everywhere at once. Behind it, a Node.js and TypeScript backend on MySQL.

The parts that matter for reliability: slow database queries were traced and fixed so the app responds in single-digit milliseconds; user sessions were moved into Redis so the backend can run on several servers at once as traffic grows; the group chat stays in sync across those servers using Redis Pub/Sub. Every feature is covered by automated tests that run against a real database before it ships, and the live system is monitored with Grafana and Loki so I see problems before users report them.

Role and timeline

Founder and sole engineer, from February 2019 to today. Product decisions, design, code, deployment and support — all of it.