Building DailyWage: A Real-Time Salary Counter with a Corgi Companion
- Published on
βIntroduction
DailyWage is the third product Carol and I built at Aburi Studio β 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 倩倩ιθͺ β a pun on 倩倩ιεΏ, "happy every day".)
βDemo
- Website: dailywage.aburi.app
- App Store: free download (iOS; Android is on the roadmap)
- Languages: English / Traditional Chinese
βWhy 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 β 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.
βKey Features
- Real-time earnings counter: ticks every 100 ms while you watch your money grow.
- Tap-to-save goals: create goals β "Trip to Japan", an emergency fund β and tap a card to allocate today's earnings into it β 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 β 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.
βTechnologies
DailyWage is an Expo (React Native) app with SwiftUI widgets β 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 720Γ β a full 24-hour workday plays out in two minutes.
βWhere 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 β 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 β 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 β I read everything.