How This Happened

The Origin Story

My fiancée asked me to create a budget tracking tool for our wedding. I am sure she meant an Excel spreadsheet. Instead I created an app in the afternoon.

In my defense, I have years — and years — of experience building management tools. By the time she finished the sentence, my brain had already moved on to the logo and icons I would need. Of course my app would spit out an Excel spreadsheet at the end.

Going Overboard (Round One)

What she got was a full application. Vendors, budgets, payment schedules, cash flow tracking, multi-event support, file attachments. The works.

To her enormous credit, she agreed to marry me anyway.

She Made It Better

Once she actually saw it, she loved it. We started using it together for our own wedding planning, which was the original point, to be fair.

She then started suggesting changes. Not technical changes - she has better things to do than argue about database schemas - but human ones. The kind of changes that make the difference between software that works and software people actually want to use. Every suggestion made it better. Most of them were obvious in hindsight, which is the mark of genuinely good feedback.

This went on for a while. It was, unexpectedly, a very good time.

Going Overboard (Round Two)

At some point she casually mentioned that a lot of people would probably want to use this. She had been looking around, and apparently well-designed wedding budget tools are not exactly abundant. She said this the way people say things when they already know what is going to happen next.

So I may have rebuilt the entire thing as a multi-user commercial product. Added internationalization, account management, member collaboration, a licensing system, legal pages - the full picture. This page you are reading is evidence of how that went.

The Future

Fortunately, years of experience building high-traffic websites and systems means the infrastructure is solid. The small traffic this site will initially generate is well within what we can handle. And if we grow - which I genuinely hope we do - I know exactly how to scale this to millions of users. I have done it before.

By the time that happens, I will be married. And one day my wife will find this page, read it, and ask me to take it down.

I will probably say yes. But not before archiving it somewhere she will not find it.