Building a personal finance app nights-only, one hour at a time, while working a full-time engineering job.
I'm a software engineer by day. By night, after my daughter goes to bed, I get roughly one hour to build. That constraint shaped every decision in this story, and honestly, I think it made the product better.
This is the story of building Toffee, a debt payoff app for iOS and Android, and the mistakes, wins, and one truly humbling analytics discovery along the way.
The idea
Debt payoff apps aren't new. Snowball vs. avalanche calculators have existed forever. But most of them feel like spreadsheets wearing a trench coat. I wanted something that felt warm and encouraging, because paying off debt is an emotional grind more than a math problem. The name Toffee, the warm orange and dark brown palette, the whole vibe was intentional: this should feel like a treat, not a tax audit.
