I wonder, what's the advantage of this type of view? I've never seen it either, but I think I'm not understanding how to get the best of it

Awesome to hear! Wasn't sure anyone else would find it useful so this is great confirmation :)

Ya its kind of hard to explain but from my experience certain categories are just easier for me to visualize on a weekly basis (for example: if I hear that i have $200/mo to eat out that sounds like a lot. But when I see it as $40/week I realize "oh that actually isn't a lot. I could accidently spend that at 1 restaurant if im not careful" just an easier way to help me not overspend

@@raroque And as someone who likes to evenly distribute paychecks across expenses each month, this is a great view. Being able to visualize "every week I want to put 25% towards X" is awesome. Can't wait to try it out!

​@@raroque Currently reading the finance book called "MAKE EPIC MONEY" and am trying to discipline in financial journey. And needed an app to help me do budgeting and track my expenses and this came around right time. Impressed to see all the features that you have in this app and am excited to try them so I have joined the waitlist, (however am Android user). One big request, hope this app will continue to build on Open-Source as world need a real world problem solving app to make their life easier, as this app seems all the possibilities to do that. Kudos and Thank you Chris. 😊 🎉

You seem to ship a lot in a very short time, What’s your daily work routine like?

​@@thefisola I should probably make a video about this haha Weekdays: lots of meetings/emails/messages during the day (my full time job at aloa.co) and then after that I usually spend the rest of the day building on one of the apps Weekends: lots of building haha And then I workout (either actual weightlifting or some cardio thing) almost every single day and then insert random stuff like hanging out with friends/dinner/etc... But I usually do plan what I'm going to work on at the beginning of the week. So for example this week, main focus is going to be Luna onboarding/beta feedback + Ellie google calendar improvements and then each day I just pick and choose whichever one I'm feeling

@@raroque Thanks for replying, Pretty impressive! +1 on the video 👀

will it be translated into Portuguese - Brazil?

I really like that solution, will likely do this actually 🙌 thank you for the suggestion!

@@raroque yh, it's a great solution

Awesome to hear, can’t wait for you to try it :)

Hey thanks so much for watching! :)

Appreciate that! Been really hard to find the balance but good to hear you felt it here :)

Thank you so much for such an incredible comment and following along 🙏 btw, email me directly and I'll help you out with the Ellie subscription :)

Onboarding another batch of users very soon! :)

Yooo thank you for watching and following along 🙌 let me know if there is anything you want to see in the future :)

Definitely leaning towards adding an option to hide currency throughout the app Also building the system so I can easily add per-category currency as well in the future, will hold off though bc I need to figure out if there are any unintended side effects I'm missing haha Thanks for the feedback!

Really appreciate the kind words here 🙌 100% you should build something btw! good luck on your journey :)

You should 100% build one! Super interesting to hear you would want to tag it even if something like categories exist, but I completely understand. Will keep this in mind :)

Thank you for watching! 🙌

Thank you! :) Would love to see what you end up making!

I’ve been using my own formatted excel sheet for budgeting. It can get annoying sometimes especially when having to make edits on mobile.

Hey thanks so much for the kind words! :)

Thank you so much for trying out Ellie and for the kind message 🥺🙏 And can’t wait for you to try out Luna!

Awesome to hear! Thanks so much for watching and following along :)

Thanks for giving it a try Kelsey! 🙏🙏🙏

Awesome! Will be doing another round of beta this week and actually going to try to get public release in the next 2 weeks 🤞 excited to hear your thoughts when you try it!

Thank you! Will be onboarding the next batch very soon :)

This is all incredible feedback, thank you so much for taking the time! 🙏 Will be doing a ton of optimization to better handle the edge cases around currencies for sure, this is something I totally underestimated haha

Added :)

Oh super interesting! Yes thanks for letting me know, will keep this in mind ✍️ had no idea actually haha Excited for you to give it a try!

Thank you! Also very interesting to know, I did not realize this was common at all 👀 had a few other beta testers mention this as well so what I'll do is build the system with this in mind so I can easily add per category currency in the future Hoooopefully shouldn't be too bad haha

Thank you! :) what are you building?

@@raroque a student enrollment saas for Charter School/Schools in low income areas. I've worked as a Director of IT at a small charter school, so I know first hand the pain points. I have some help from Enrollment specialist as well.

Thanks so much for following along! 🙌🙌🙌 hopefully the app can help, tbh building it so I can enter that era too 😂

Got you, will add in next update! ✍️✍️

100% will be adding this stuff :) Also shoutout to you for being waitlist user #1 Eric 🙌🙌

Thanks for joining the waitlist and for the thoughts! :) 100% will add import/export, I’m a big proponent of users owning their data and have this feature in all my other apps And for sure 1 time purchase option once I roll out the subscription (which won’t come for a while) I plan on supporting web/desktop so cloud is involved for this :)

Thank you! My gf made most of them :)

Can't wait for you to try it! And thank you so much for being an Ellie user 🙌

Thank you! And added :)

For sure! Thanks for watching and let me know if there is anything you want to see in the future :)

Thank you for watching :)

Thank you for watching! 🫶

Hey Herman, thanks for the feedback! Will keep this in mind if I go the route of allowing people to change (and re-calculate) based on the current exchange rate. For now, its simply a formatting swap so no real conversion happens yet :)

Thank you! :) 1. Small batches of 100 people every 1-2 weeks (using Testflight to distribute the app). 2. Just manually collecting feedback but now analytics are installed so i can see things like retention and feature usage! 3. Simple framer website + Formspark for the waitlist :)

@@raroque Thanks Chris 👏

Thank you and glad you found it helpful! :) Actually using Framer for the landing page and a thing called Formspark to track emails!

Thanks so much for watching :)

I'll choose for you: Flutter this is just based on the research I've done so far, I bet other people will have other answers and there is probably a more nuanced answer like "it depends if..." but if I had to give you a straight answer: Flutter

Thank you! :) Actually from scratch haha There are a few videos on my channel talking about some of the design iterations for the app if you’re curious about my design process!

@@raroque That's Excellent! Keep it up Chris

Oh interesting, ya I can definitely account for multiple budgets I saw YNAB and others do something where it’s almost like a dropdown and if you switch between the budgets it’s like a copy of the app. So separate categories, separate transactions, etc… Like that?

@@raroque exactly that

Ah great point, tbh will have to look more into this one! 👀

Thanks for following along! :)

Glad to hear you found that helpful! Might do a more in depth explanation in a future video :) esp on animations

Might make a video on the animation stuff, getting a lot of questions about that :) I was going to go the SwiftData route but after some research it looks like it might be missing a few things that CoreData has so to be safe I chose CoreData Also, since CoreData has been around for a while I know ChatGPT has a lot of knowledge on it compared to SwiftData so that was a big bonus 😅 I use ChatGPT a lot when it comes to learning new concepts so it was actually important to factor it in

Thanks so much for taking the time to watch! 🙌🙌

ah wow i did not even think of that, thought this would be a big edge case but you're very right 🤔 Someone else suggested rounding up and truncating, so 10,000 would be 10K or 10.1K in any areas of the app that have limited real estate (like the homescreen). On the transactions/category pages I think there is enough space for the full amount Thoughts on this? Very open to suggestions or if you know of any apps that handle the Yen very well, will definitely do more research

@@raroque It would definitely be preferable to have 10.1k instead of 10k. Although to be honest, I think the target demo of a budget app would prefer to see the whole thing, me included. Also, this would open up a different kind of inconsistency. Since you show what's left and the allocated budget, there would be a point where the other is in the 10s and the other value is in the 1000s, so the "k" formatting would be quite jarring. Also, food for thought would be currencies that typically reach 6 digits and for the custom input you have, currencies that don't deal with decimals, yen included. As for possible app references, I don't really have enough experience on budget apps since I've since dropped using them and switched to spreadsheets but the longest one I've used (about 4 years on and off) and would still consider good is Wallet by BudgetBakers. It's not a super UI/UX focused app but I was happy throughout the period of my usage, the problem is mostly with my specific use case of having multiple bank accounts. You could also check their multi-currency support which is honestly amazing. You could use multiple currencies at the same time and declare conversion rates per entry. It's very useful for immigrants that deals with two or more currencies daily and sometimes for investors with multiple currency accounts, but I guess that can be considered an edge case. Don't take my word for it as I'm not a UI/UX guy by any means but I personally think the main difference is the three column layout you got going compared to most apps using a two column layout which lessens the complexity of formatting. I kind of remember from your previous vlogs that you might have used two columns at the start and dropped it? Maybe you could reconsider it.

Thanks for joining! Unfortunately going to take some time on Android, going to really figure out the feature set on iOS and then once its good port it to Android hopefully :)

@@raroque any thoughts on using Flutter for building this? :)

Ah good to know! There is a chance I'll support in the future so I'll keep the Canada/Europe in mind :)

Thank you! And just added it to :)

To the App* 🙌

Next beta soon :)

Appreciate that and that’s awesome haha 🙌 Used framer for this ($5/mo one page plan) and hooked it up to formspark actually, wanted to get it up really quickly and this was what I was fastest with!

@@raroque Nice lol I used framer also and hooked it up to airtable cause im cheap lol but it doesnt provide any extra data like yours so I appreciate the info

Thats awesome! Good luck with the project :) Will be releasing a laptop version for sure! Also feel free to take any ideas you like, would actually love to see what you come up with :) "for the lengthy characters (5:44) why don't you give like a currency choosing drop down on the top" -> this could be a good solution, will try! Thanks for watching :)

Thanks for following along! Good luck on your building journey, you got this 🙌

🥹 🙌

Right now videos like this are what drive most waitlist sign ups :) A lot of marketing I do is this type of “build in public” content on KZfaq and twitter, but if I wasn’t allowed to post stuff like this I would be trying to build a waitlist by engaging people in communities like Reddit or Facebook groups

Got it :)

Or even like do 6.9k or 7.2k can also help shorten that up

Will be doing this! :) And thanks for watching 🙌

actually self taught :) Did a minor in college to study computer science but did not end up using much from that to build apps

@@raroque Amazing, I am in the same situation at the moment, teaching my self how to code and build an app coming from a marketing major background. Thank you for your content truly one of a kind!

Thank you, very excited for you to test it! 🙌 (And added PLN ✍️)

Unfortunately Apple only, but once the core features are concrete for the iOS app I’ll look into porting to android

Thank you! Likely be subscription but with option to do a one time purchase at 3X yearly price, I do the same thing for my other app Ellie and it’s worked out very well so far :) btw beta testers will be gradfathered into any subscription that comes later, so definitely sign up once you get the invite so you get it for free :)

@@raroque Thanks for the reply. English isn't my first language, so just making sure - beta testers will be getting the app for free once it launches officially?

@@NilanjanMustafi correct :)

@@raroque Thank you. I signed up for the waitlist.

Thank you! Unfortunately no android for a while :( Need to nail down the feature set on iOS first then will probably port it over

Going to try to hold off for a bit on the bank integration (it opens up a whole new level of complexity to the app that I’m not yet ready for) Android will come after the bank most likely :)

launch soooon 👀🙌

First time anyone has asked for this! Any good apps that use this method I could take a look at? Happy to explore this :) And thanks for watching!

@@raroqueI don’t know if this is what they’re referring to, but you may want to check out the app Budget App (white background, yellow and purple icon). Could provide an example of this

Very interesting 🤔 do you have any examples of apps that do this? Just checked Venmo and a few others and I actually thought they did too but looks like they might have reverted at some point maybe I’ll experiment and try it out though, curious how it feels

@@raroque check out YNAB

It’s called formspark :)

Thank you! Unfortunately no plan yet so I can focus on figuring out the feature set but once that’s more concrete will very likely build that out :)

@@raroque Thanks for getting back to me. Will probably wait for the android one, if you decide to make it in the future

Thanks for watching! :)

First, thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough/thoughtful reply 🙌 - Will be adding an option for users to hide currency throughout the app (looks like a few other international budgeting apps might be doing this too) - "Some countries use commas and periods in contradictory ways to your design" this is a very good point. I now realize that in places I've made custom components like the new transaction page with the "." that won't work if the user has a currency that uses commas. Will have to re-think the strategy to be careful here. - On the converting values for the currency change -> I'm also worried about this (because also undoing might not be as simple). Will likely not be going this route for a while but if I do, will probably give people options here. I'm really glad I posted this video. I'm getting so many comments like this making me aware of different edge cases that I haven't considered Thanks for the feedback, super helpful 🙌

@@raroque you're also excelling at one thing I find hard to do myself, and is seemingly thin on the ground amongst my peers: take feedback on the chin without exhibiting some level of stroppyness! Good for you bro, you'll go far. There's not many folks that are actually both full-stack and able to make a decent looking app. Good on you!

Hey really appreciate the offer but trying to keep editing stuff myself to learn a bit more, maybe in the future though! :)

Abercrombie :)

Wow thanks for pointing this out! Had no idea actually, I’ll swap them out when I submit to the App Store to be safe. Thanks for the heads up 🙏

Swift/SwiftUI :)

Native :)

Firebase (auth/db) + SwiftUI and a super simple express server for a few endpoints I need Only cost so far is like $5/mo for the express server! Still on the free tier for Firebase My other app, Ellie, has ~1K MAU and doing a few million read operations per day and I think costs like $20/mo. So I don't anticipate the Firebase bill for Luna will be too high for a while either.

​@@raroqueThanks for replying❤

Separate repos! Typically one for each front end (so 2 front end repos for Ellie) and then one backend repo

@@raroque One more question: I imagine you're using Figma for designs. Are you using any UI libraries, design systems, etc to help you with rapid prototyping?

@@DouglasWiseRogers actually started purely prototyping in SwiftUI direct for Luna. The only UI library I use is actually Ant design for a few of the web components! :)

Got it! ✍️

Added 40+ currencies so far and will keep going! Still trying to figure out Android support though 🤔

Excited for you to try it :) Swift/SwiftUI for the app! Only cost so far has been the landing page which is $5/mo!

@@raroque which tool are you using for the landing page? bro what if you make a short and simple video on how we can make apps like you because we also have some ideas. with process and all like which tools to use? what language do we need and how much does it cost? please bro it really help us?

Thank you! Actually a great idea for a video 🤔 Current strategy is going to be free plan + some pro plan But I will probably not release the pro plan until there are enough features to make it worth it (might be a few months). Will probably be $4.99/mo and then eventually if there is enough value up to $9.99/mo. And then some sort of lifetime plan at 3x the yearly subscription. 50% off for students/non-profit And between us, I also plan on grandfathering anyone who signs up before I release the pro plans with a lifetime pro plan 🤫 as a thank you for early support This is the strategy I used for Ellie and it worked out pretty well haha

Got it! And no android plans yet but once the core features are solid for iOS will look into building android :)

Added! 🫡

Added ✍️

Ah unfortunately not for a while, will be focusing on fleshing out the core features of the iOS app first before porting to Android Will add IDR though!

Swift and Firebase :)

Sooooo many haha, added 40 in the last month Which do you use? :)

Actually just a one page Framer website + Formspark for the email collection In the future, I might look at actually waitlist software haha

Got it, thanks for watching :)

Formspark! :)

Not yet! But onboarding people every day from the waitlist :) Just oboarded another 500 people last night!

@@raroque Awesome cant wait to get my hands on this app.

Got it! ✍️

Oh this is good to know actually, will factor this in (and do a bit more research to see what other apps do for CAD)

Got it! ✍️

Swift/SwiftUI!

Will 100% be doing it (the demand was just so high haha) but no idea on the timeline :( I've had a lot of devs reach out actually and I might make a public API so people can make an Android client

Waitlist link in the description :) I’m onboarding people every single week, just added 500 people last night