Expenses iOS app

tl;dr: Expenses iOS app that tracks your expenses, works offline, no AI, no tracking data, no b*llshit.

This was my first time ever building an app. The whole thing started because I was watching Pat’s Starter Story YouTube channel and saw a tweet from someone who wanted an app that just showed 3 numbers: daily expenses, weekly expenses, and monthly expenses. Nothing else. No charts, no categories, no AI-powered insights. Just 3 numbers.

I thought, “I can build that.”

The App Itself

The concept was dead simple: open the app, see how much you’ve spent today, this week, and this month. Log an expense and the numbers update. That’s it. Works offline, no tracking, no account needed.

I went with Expo Go and it was amazing. This was my first time building a mobile app and Expo made it feel almost too easy. Scan a QR code, see your app running on your actual phone. No Xcode nightmares, no Android Studio setup. Just write code and see it instantly.

I also used some Figma templates I found online to create the App Store screenshots. Having pre-made templates is always a life saver.

Monetization

I integrated RevenueCat because I wanted to charge around $4/month for the app. The ironic part? The subscription itself would automatically show up as an expense in the app. At least the app was honest about it.

Building in Public

I was also building in public on X/Twitter during this project. Sharing progress, posting screenshots, the whole thing. I had around 12 followers at the time and most of them were bots. Not exactly a viral audience, but it didn’t stop me from posting updates to essentially nobody.

Why It’s Deprecated

What killed this project wasn’t the code or the idea — it was the App Store publishing process. Apple’s review requirements were exhausting. Multiple rejections, vague feedback, endless back-and-forth with App Store Connect. For a simple expense tracker, the amount of hoops I had to jump through felt completely disproportionate.

I eventually decided it wasn’t worth the fight and moved on to other projects. The app works, the code is there, but it never made it to the App Store.

Lesson learned: building the app is the easy part. Getting Apple to let people use it is a whole different game.