On the use of other channels, I’m quite conflicted. I’m trying to optimise for ASO but it’s clearly not working, at least not without a considerable amount of reviews (who’s going to pay, even if it’s the price of a coffee) for something without any references?

I did a small test with Google ads, but it was a disaster, with every click costing around $1, which would most likely lose me money with every purchase. Not sure if that’s a valid investment.

Then social networks: reddit is already filled with vibecoded alternatives and as a user, it is really tiring to see one or two masked ads in every post. I don’t want to contribute to that. I think I could still contact some (micro)influencers to get some publicity in Instagram/TikTok, but I’m honestly so tired of that type of content that I’m not sure I want to go that way.

Sorry for the rant :)

but this checks out with my experience: extremely low visibility on the stores, I think I need to improve description/keywords and get more reviews. thanks for sharing!

I have some that are still valid, so hopefully you can redeem one of them:

  J0VMWKELS94CYMD7JJ281WZ

  HCAFBBPFNHUWG30BKKS6ZNY

  G85E4PVU1DRYBE99AF5SW49 

  0WJZFV6HUCXPSV08N7WMYJL

I wanted to make something totally different, with the hopes that it can make you a bit more conscious about your spending and habits.

At the end of the month, the app guides you through a reflection flow where you can learn about your habits and think about what you want to improve. 100% offline, fully private, no AI.

The app is paid, but I actually made a page for HN readers to get it for free, I'm having a lot of trouble with distribution: https://getkakeibo.com/hn/

could you share with me your device model, OS version and the language you have set up in your device? either here, or via email to pablo@getkakeibo.com, whatever is easier for you. thank you and sorry again!

edit: I managed to reproduce the issue! the fix is on the way, I’m currently building the new version and will let you know once the update is available. It might take a few days, but I’m hopeful the review will be quick.

For the past few years I've been following the kakebo/kakeibo method to track my expenses and savings. The term might be a bit obscure, but it's really simple: plan your monthly spending based on your income and fixed expenses; track your expenses and categorise them in one of 4 categories (needs, wants, culture, unexpected); at the end of the month, reflect on your spending: look at aggregates by category, spot trends… overall, just be a bit more conscious about where you are spending your money, and use that to improve next month. Improving isn’t just about spending less money, but to actually spend it where it makes you the happiest.

I was buying specific notebooks made for the method, and even if I love that “zen” moment of sitting down and filling it out daily or weekly, being a developer I needed to make it an app, obviously. I toyed with the idea 4 years ago while learning Svelte, but eventually discarded it like most of my hobby projects. However, last year I decided to get serious and build a real app, as simple as possible, so I could actually ship it.

The goal was to translate the best parts of the method (tracking and reflection) to a digital format, and reap its benefits: always available, incredibly fast to track a transaction, and useful stats. On top of that, and extremely exhausted from the current trend of subscription apps, I wanted it to be as respectful as possible. One-time, small payment to get it, no upsells or ads, no weird permission requests, data always exportable and totally offline.

On the technical side, it’s just an Expo app backed by a SQLite database, no other fancy technologies, no servers, no complex setup. I wanted it to be as lean as possible, and I’m pretty happy with the result and by how easy it is to maintain it. An added benefit of using an SQLite database is that one of the export options is to get the full database, and since you can also import data from one, you can basically hack it however you want in your computer, and get it back to the app. In the end, it’s your app, it’s your data, you should be free to do whatever you want with it.

I spend a lot of time reading HN, so even if I’m quite scared of what might come out of this, I wanted to ask for some feedback from you. The app works perfectly fine for me (been using it daily since the year began) and for some of my friends, however, I’m having a bit of trouble getting it in front of people, mainly because I don’t really want to do paid advertisement or similar strategies. So if you are slightly interested, I’d really appreciate you trying out the app and sharing some thoughts. Since the app is paid, I have put up a page that gives you a promo code for the platform of your choice [1].

Thank you!

[1] https://getkakeibo.com/hn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280241

Points: 2

# Comments: 3