Bye Dotch

I’ve always wanted to build a personal finance app.

At first it was Cruncher, a web app to parse bank statements. It was useful, but I couldn’t focus on improving it. As soon as there was an alternative (Inflow), I shut down my app.

Last year, my itch came back. This time I wanted something to split bills automatically. Splitwise works okay for this, but I wanted something that makes it easy to settle payments as well. Enter Dotch.

I designed three iterations for Dotch, but couldn’t make time to build any of them. Instead, I took one function of the app (scanning bills) and built an MVP based on that. Scan a bill and share with friends.

After about 11 months, here’s what the stats look like.

A few people use the app, but not enough to justify maintaining it or paying for a domain. Most importantly, the app doesn’t work for me or solve any real problems for people I care about.

I don’t have the time to build the Dotch I really want, so I’m shutting it down on August 31, 2024. Samson discovered a new app that seems to do the same thing: billpeer.app. I haven’t used it, but it’s worth a try.

If you’d like to continue using Dotch regardless, you can fork the repo and host it: https://github.com/helloworld-ng/dotch.