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    Personal Finance · Gamification

    Stack Up

    The first product I shipped. A personal finance system designed to make spending, budgeting, and saving easier to understand and more engaging.

    Built with Base44React
    Live app

    Problem

    Most budgeting apps assume you already have the discipline they are supposed to build. They show you a pie chart after the money is gone. Stack Up started from the opposite question: what would make a student actually open a finance app on a normal Tuesday? The answer was progress — visible streaks, goals that move, and numbers small enough to act on.

    What I built

    • Expense tracking
    • Budget management
    • Savings goals
    • Gamification
    • Streaks
    • Financial analytics

    Built by Andrew

    Inside the product

    The main screens and what each one does.

    • Safe-to-spend
      Month trend
      Top categories
      Streak status

      Dashboard

      One screen answers the only question that matters day to day: how much is left, and is this month on track compared to the last one.

    • Quick add
      Smart categories
      Recurring entries
      Edit history

      Expense capture

      Logging a spend takes a few seconds — amount, category, optional note — because anything slower gets abandoned within a week.

    • Category caps
      Burn-down bars
      Goal projection
      Overspend alerts

      Budgets & goals

      Budgets are per category with live burn-down, and savings goals project a realistic finish date from actual deposit behaviour.

    • Daily streak
      XP levels
      Category breakdown
      Month-over-month

      Streaks & analytics

      Gamification is tied to behaviour that actually helps — logging consistently and staying under budget — not to spending more.

    Tech stack

    • Interface

      ReactComponent-driven UIResponsive layoutsCharting

    • Logic

      Budget engineStreak & XP rulesGoal projectionCategory rollups

    • Data

      Per-user recordsTransaction historyRecurring entriesAuth

    • Platform

      Base44Hosted deployment

    Challenges & how I solved them

    • Gamifying finance without encouraging bad habits

      Early reward rules accidentally rewarded activity, which meant more transactions scored higher. I rewrote the scoring so streaks come from consistent logging and staying inside budget, and goal progress is the only thing that drives levels.

    • Making budgets survive real life

      A rigid monthly cap breaks the first time an unexpected bill lands. Budgets became rolling, with carry-over and a separate 'irregular' bucket, so one bad week does not invalidate the whole month.

    • Keeping data entry under ten seconds

      Retention died on friction. I cut the add-expense flow to a single sheet with remembered categories and recurring entries, which removed most repeat typing.

    • Shipping a first product end to end

      This was the first thing I took from idea to live URL — auth, data modelling, state, deployment. The lesson that carried into every project after it was to ship a narrow version and let real usage decide the next feature.

    Results so far

    Status
    LivePublicly usable at stackup-app.base44.app.
    First shipped product
    2024Idea to deployed app end to end.
    Core modules
    5Expenses, budgets, goals, streaks, analytics.
    Entry time
    < 10sDesign target for logging a spend.

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