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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

    Timeline

    When this piece of work started and where it stands today.

    1. Started

      1 Sept 2024

    2. Completed

      1 Mar 2025

    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

    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.

    Early traction

    Stack Up attracted 600+ visitors within its first week after launch, demonstrating strong early interest following launch.

    600+
    Website visitors

    First week after launch.

    Figure measures website visitors, not registered or active users.

    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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