The uncensored introduction
From a Proxmox server to 45k lines of Swift. Read how Cuppi was built to handle bin days, budgets, and family life with a privacy-first, "cosy" approach.
23:50. Burning eyes. Charcoal brain. A year ago when I started working on my family life organising, locally hosted budgeting website on my Proxmox server, I was not expecting that 1.5 year later I will be a few weeks away from releasing my second, but this time MASSIVE iOS app.
The beginnings
Life was super simple with some html and javascript. Now, im swimming in 45k lines of Swift code, vigorously trying to comply with GDPR laws, App Store requirements and trying to understand privacy laws because I randomly decided in the autumn of 2025 that building a fancy Bin Day and Budgeting app for the Great British people is a brilliant idea.
I scrolled through a ton of screenshots of the early days of the app today. Generic, grey, the UI is all over the place, permission issues, awful loading times. Nearly 800 hours later, its almost nostalgic looking back at the state of the app. But i was extremely excited to finally manage to sync data with the servers, so everyone in the household would get a locally produced notification ping at the set date and time, telling everyone “It’s bin day tomorrow”.
Honestly, its very impressive how the app looks like now and the different kind of issues I’m facing. Its not about budget logic or broken UI elements anymore. Its the big scary dev things that keeps me up at night (like oh shit, what if a family member passes away and they are the owner of the household, so we need to implement legacy features to transfer ownership. But what if the only other member is a Child?!)
The big ‘Why’
As i mentioned on the About Cuppi page in the app: adulting absolutely sucks, big tech squeezing the last bit of private data juice out of you is an ick and remembering the simplest things, like your cat’s medications and yes, bin days and birthdays is overwhelming. Man, im tired just writing it down.
So, the idea of Cuppi is a combination of many things. I want my family's life to stay private, I only want to write down an important information once and get reminded gently. Like the pet insurance is about to renew or nan’s birthday is next week.
Following this revelation, I realised that most of the boring stuff is a write-it-down-once and let-the-machine-deal-with-it type of thing. Birthdays never change, Bin Days maybe revised once a year, your Pet borns once and has the same microchip for the rest of their lives. Your Budget stays the same for a long time and usually you only adjust when your fixed term contract is up for renewal. And thats another 12 months.
Thats why I chose to start with Pets, Birthdays, Budget, Receipts and Bin Day. And some of the apps became very advanced while keeping it user friendly. And there is so much more to come to make life easier. Like a more advanced Companion which posts on your Home Feed with feature rich messages, deeply integrated with in-apps.
Subscriptions, we all hate it
Lets talk about subscriptions. Dont get me wrong, Im not a big fan of them. If i could, i would just give the app away for free to use. But servers cost money and our cats also need to eat something. Breaking the promise of not advertising and selling personal information is out of the question. The next less evil thing to do is a flat fee to keep the app running while figuring out an alternative revenue, ethical source. I’m sure there are other ways to keep the lights on once there is a fixed number of people using Cuppi.
Anyway, im extremely excited and terrified at the same time thinking about people using something that I dreamed up, developed, tested and used daily. I do feel that this silly app could bring calm into the every day chaos.
I will talk about the in-apps and features of the app in the next couple of blog posts. And if you are reading this last sentence, wow. Thank you !