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Building DailyWage: A Real-Time Salary Counter with a Corgi Companion

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DailyWage — watch your salary tick

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Introduction

DailyWage is the third product Carol and I built at Aburi Studio — the smallest and most playful one, and weirdly, the one with some of the most interesting engineering.

It answers a question every office worker has asked at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday: "How much have I actually earned so far today?" (In Chinese it's called 天天開薪 — a pun on 天天開心, "happy every day".)

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Demo

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Why we created this project

People work for their goals and dreams, but the daily grind makes it easy to want to give up.

Your salary is a number that appears at the end of the month — too far removed from these three hours this afternoon. What if you could see time turning into money, every single second? Would the workday feel a little more worth it?

So we built a small, comforting tool: enter your monthly salary and working hours, and it updates your earnings every 100 milliseconds, four decimal places and all, while a pixel-art corgi keeps you company. Outside working hours and on weekends, the corgi sleeps.

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Key Features

  • Real-time earnings counter: ticks every 100 ms while you watch your money grow.
  • Tap-to-save goals: create goals — "Trip to Japan", an emergency fund — and tap a card to allocate today's earnings into it — long-press to allocate continuously. Completed goals get stamped with a traditional ink-seal animation.
  • Monthly rhythm: a monthly progress bar fills as the month goes on, and goals marked as fixed expenses (rent!) reset automatically on the 1st.
  • Widgets: today's earnings and monthly progress tick along on your home screen and lock screen — with working, sleeping, and celebrating corgi variants.
  • 100% private: no accounts, no cloud. All financial data stays on your device, and the app is completely free with no ads.

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Technologies

DailyWage is an Expo (React Native) app with SwiftUI widgets — and deliberately no backend: everything stays on your device. My favorite development detail: you can't QA a watch-your-salary-all-day app in real time, so dev mode can run the clock at 720× — a full 24-hour workday plays out in two minutes.

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Where it's at

DailyWage is live on the App Store, completely free with no ads, and Android is on the roadmap.

If your workday could use a corgi and a satisfying number going up, give it a try — and if it makes you smile at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday, it did its job.

DailyWage is part of a small family of tools we're building at Aburi Studio around time and money — alongside CoreHour, a minimalist time-boxing app (read about it here), and FireFree, a FIRE planning app (read about it here).

If you have feedback, find me on X or email me — I read everything.