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

- Canonical: https://easonchang.com/posts/dailywage
- Date: 2026-07-29T00:00:00.000Z
- Language: en
- Description: DailyWage is a free iOS app from Aburi Studio that shows your salary ticking up every 100 ms, with a pixel corgi companion, tap-to-save goals, and widgets. No backend — your data never leaves your device.

![DailyWage — watch your salary tick](/images/dailywage/dailywage-og-en.png)

## Introduction

**[DailyWage](https://dailywage.aburi.app)** is the third product [Carol](https://carolhsiao.com) and I built at **[Aburi Studio](https://aburistudio.com)** — 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".)

## Demo

- **Website:** [dailywage.aburi.app](https://dailywage.aburi.app)
- **App Store:** [free download](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6758375748) (iOS; Android is on the roadmap)
- **Languages:** English / Traditional Chinese

## 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.

## 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.

## 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.

## Where it's at

DailyWage is [live on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6758375748), 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](/posts/corehour)), and **FireFree**, a FIRE planning app ([read about it here](/posts/firefree)).

If you have feedback, find me on [X](https://x.com/easondev) or [email me](mailto:eason@easonchang.com) — I read everything.