build
Built for myself
Two apps I use every day.
the problem
Food and training, and shared money, each needed an app that did the whole job, privately.
why it hurts
People stay with a flawed incumbent until something clearly better exists.
what i built
Two apps to replace them: Fuel for food and training, and Tally for shared money, each installable to a phone with privacy enforced in the database. I built them for myself, as their most impatient user.
the apps
Food, weight and training in one phone app: photograph a meal or scan a barcode for the macros, and it works offline.
One shared ledger for two people that separates what left the bank from what each person really spent.
how it works
01 / 08
Four ways in, because friction is why food tracking gets abandoned. Photo, barcode, search, or a saved meal, with the day still empty underneath.
02 / 08
The training half of the same app: the session plan for the day, and sets logged weight by reps as they happen.
03 / 08
Search runs against the Open Food Facts corpus, so real supermarket products come back with real per-100g numbers.
04 / 08
The day once a meal has landed: calories left against target, the four macros underneath, weight and steps below that.
05 / 08
Merchant memory: three letters of Sainsbury's and the category, the card and the 50/50 split are filled in. The amount never is. Invented data throughout.
06 / 08
The four numbers, worked out when read: what left my accounts, my real spend, household spend counted once, and the running balance between us.
07 / 08
One ledger, searchable: every Sainsbury's shop this month, whoever paid and from whichever card.
08 / 08
Settling up is a transfer, not spending: the balance goes to all square and no category moves.
why it's useful
Both are in daily use.
what i learnt
- Daily return is the bar.
- Personalisation does not need a model; knowing what not to predict matters more.
- Pick the smallest stack that works for each app.
technical specs
- Two stacks, chosen per app. Fuel is a single file of vanilla JavaScript with no build step. Tally is React 19 and TypeScript on Vite, with Tailwind CSS v4.
- Both run on Supabase, with row-level security doing the privacy work in the database, and both install to a phone.
- Fuel works fully offline and syncs when it can. Tally keeps a ledger of what happened and works out its four numbers when read.
- Fuel resolves barcodes and searches against Open Food Facts, and a vision model estimates photographed meals as editable entries.
- Tally scopes every row to a household through a single security-definer function, with its own schema and schema-scoped grants.