Introduction
As my regular readers know, this is not what I was supposed to publish today. This post was meant to be the follow-up to my live-streaming article, but, well, things happened. A few days after I wrote that article, I was showing some of my work to friends and acquaintances, and they stumbled upon a small Next.js project I had built for myself. I initially made it just to play around with React's useReducer hook and just track my expenses, but, apparently, people found it really useful.
And, of course, that meant one thing: unsolicited suggestions.
The "Expense Tracker" Days
I lost the data so don't mind the zeros
At the time, Fin Flow was as basic as it gets. I had only implemented three features:
- Add an expense
- View all expenses
That was it. Nothing fancy. No frills. Just a simple way for me to track where my money (read: mostly expenses) was going.
I started to feel that the app should have a way to track income also and in the react approach I was just using the local storage for the storage of the data of a user so it was local to the device they are using. I faced the device issue myself because I primarily used the app on my phone but when I needed to see the transactions or get a csv file I had to get it from my phone and then transfer it over to my PC.
So I went and created a new next js project to overcome the problems of the react one I just added the feature to track the total balance the user had but messed up the code so it became the balance of today.
One of my friend liked the feature very much as it showed his daily profit in trading stocks so I made it a feature then one of them asked me to add a category system and then the list went on with some features that I had the idea for.
Enter The Features & The Bugs
Major features after 1 week of development
First, I added the requested financial calculations—net profit per day and total lifetime balance. Seemed simple enough. Then, because I like suffering, I decided to add email verification and Google login.
For the google login it could have worked without verification but when I got to the page I thought why not get this experience too for verifying an app after all I am not doing any shady stuff just tracking expenses. I thought the verification was straight forward but after application for the verification I got this email
Email telling that the homepage should not redirect somewhere else.
Turns out, Google only verifies a page if the provided URL doesn’t redirect to another location. My app didn’t have a landing page at that point, so I threw one together in record time(1 day/no AI). Since Google also wanted a privacy policy, I slapped a generic "Your data is protected" template onto it because, honestly, I don’t collect any data anyway.
Balancing Bugs and Boards
Now, adding features is fun. Debugging them? Not so much. My friends, the accidental beta testers, helped me find a ton of bugs. Some they reported, and some they just exploited silently (which is mildly concerning). All this while, my 12th board exams were creeping closer, meaning I had very little time to actually work on the app.
Yet, somehow, between my exams and my obsession with side projects, the app started gaining traction. Thanks to word-of-mouth, I got 15-16 users in a day. Not bad for something that started as an experiment with useReducer.
Wrapping Up
Fin Flow landing page
You can now visit https://finflow.divyanshulohani.xyz to use the app yourself if you want I know there are still few bugs around but I will get them fixed as soon as I can. For now all can use the app wtihout any hassale.
Revisiting Fin Flow, a project I had almost abandoned turned out to be an unexpectedly fun experience. What was once a simple side project just for learning has now evolved into something that could actually become a full-fledged product. Who knew?
So, if you ever start a side project just for fun, keep an eye on it—you never know when it might demand a landing page, a privacy policy, and a bunch of users breaking things.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own the rights to the word "Fin Flow" and am not attempting to emulate or impersonate any existing business. The name is simply a fun, AI-generated placeholder used for this project.
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