Firely.app is out!
Firely.app is out!
It’s a personal SaaS I’ve built to better track my spending. If you’ve followed my writing, you’ll know I’m big on personal finance - I even wrote an article on lending money.
How I discovered FIRE
My journey into financial independence started after being laid off from a job. It got me thinking: would I be working my entire life? Is there an end to this? To live with dignity, do I have to trade my time infinitely, even into old age?
I started looking up resources on managing money better and stumbled upon “Your Money or Your Life”. The book delivers on its title - your relationship with money and how you deal with it can either supercharge or drain your life.
Reading it was a life-defining moment. It reframed everything by equating your hourly rate with how many hours you’re trading for certain items. Does your phone feel worth it when it cost you an entire week of work? Are you happy giving a “friend” a gift worth 10 hours of your life when he wouldn’t give you 10 minutes of his time? Does spending an hour’s worth of money on a personal hobby feel satisfying?
Building a foundation
My journey then led me to Quit Like a Millionaire and JL Collins’ The Simple Path to Wealth. Both books formed a great foundation and an all-encompassing philosophy without requiring me to grok thousands of pages of literature.
They did arrive at a key point: the need to invest in stocks and bonds. I thought, well, I need to dive even deeper - so I read ETFs for the Long Run and Abner’s The ETF Handbook.
Finding an investment platform was a big hurdle since I’m Egyptian and live in Egypt. Most trading platforms outright ban or don’t allow Egyptians. I’d love to share that experience, but perhaps in another post. With much luck, I eventually found GoTrade and more recently Nsave.
Beyond finances: a life philosophy
Another instrumental book was Early Retirement Extreme, which I consider more of a life philosophy than a finance book. To give you an idea, it lists Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings as an inspiration.
I was particularly struck by the concept of being a renaissance man - excelling in multiple areas of life instead of being a one-dimensional cog in our capitalistic society, easily replaced. There’s so much you can discern about someone’s view of life, work, and everything else by how they view money’s role. This is something I’d like to expand on in future posts.
Why I built Firely
Now, back to Firely - sorry, I couldn’t help sharing what led me here!
I’d been tracking my finances for a couple of years in a simple ODS spreadsheet. I like keeping things simple, but this method had a few flaws:
- Memory burden: If I was out, I had to memorize or write things down. I believe cognition is like RAM - it’s not made to hold information, but to quickly process it.
- Complex calculations: Any fancy analysis required equations and formulas - another skill and time investment I wasn’t ready to make.
- Accessibility: I could only access it from my computer.
- No automatic backup: Everything had to be done manually.
Enter LLMs
Thankfully, with the rise of LLMs (thank you, dear Claude), I was able to spin up a prototype during a weekend and host it on Vercel. I believe this is one of the real benefits of LLMs: personal micro-SaaS is the next big thing. Now anybody, developer or not, can spin up an app that solves their niche need.
The very first commit was on January 1, 2025, but I’ve been slowly iterating to reach a stable version. The app may still contain bugs, which I’d gladly like to learn about. You can report any issues via X or email me at [email protected].
Looking forward to hearing what you think!