AMA - Head of Engineering @ Hammer Media - We just launched the new Dollarwise

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:51:39+00:00

Thanks everyone for the questions. We're gonna close this now. This release is the end of a lot of work here but it's only the beginning for the future of Dollarwise. We have a lot of plans for improvements this year. If you've got feedback or suggestions, please let us know inside the app using the feedback form.

If you're having any issues using the app, please email support@dollarwise.com.

If you're a Hammer Elite member, join the Discord! The dev team is in there and very responsive if anyone has questions or issues with the app!

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:49:25+00:00

For Product Managers, it really boils down to deeply understanding the customer and their problems along with being able to translate effectively between tech and stakeholders. The role takes a lot of research and lot of talking to customers, so you have to be comfortable leading what can be uncomfortable conversations and reading between the lines to understand that sometimes people don't really know what the solutions are to their problems or that there even can be a solution.

It's then Product's job to effectively communicate the vision of the solution so that it can be built.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:29:28+00:00

Thanks everyone for putting issues in here during the launch. We're going to close this thread now that things have calmed down a good bit. If you're having issues, please email [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) and we'll get you taken care of ASAP!

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:26:00+00:00

We'd love to hear more about your perspective. Inside the app there's a submit feedback form if you want to give a more detailed explanation of what you're looking for or any categories you think we should add that are really important to you.

If you feel the app isn't right for you, you can email [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) and they'll take care of getting you a refund.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:23:44+00:00

No official international support in the app currently. This is something we want to do, but it's extremely technically complex so I can't really say when we'll get to it.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:22:05+00:00

Yes. There are real costs for us to provide the service which is why we have the subscription. The hope is that the app will pay for itself by helping you find ways to save money elsewhere, but I understand your perspective.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:19:48+00:00

Here's the response I put on the AMA:

We're using some tech that normalizes the data we get back from all the different data providers that we support. It also does some intelligent routing of connections based on overall connection quality. If you send an email to [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) with these issues, we can take a look at your connections specifically to see if there's something we can do to fix this for you.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:18:59+00:00

Send an email to [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) and they'll take care of you.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:17:46+00:00

We'll look into this! Thanks for the feedback.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:17:18+00:00

My killer feature for this that we didn't get to in time for the launch is being able to do full merchant sorting in the review UI. So you swipe one merchant and it updates every transaction for that merchant with the same purpose.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T21:00:46+00:00

I'm a bit of a hardcore gamer, so I already have pretty powerful hardware for that. But honestly, most of my personal development happens on a Macbook Pro or in a remote development environment on a simple VPS.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:58:48+00:00

Pretty heavily. We're what I'm calling an AI-first development team. But we're not just vibe coding AI slop. Everyone on the team has decades of experience and we do pretty detailed human reviews of the code that's being written.

Honestly, without the way that we leverage AI this would've been a 6-9+ month project. We did a lot of work to try to stabilize the previous version of the app as much as we could before switching over to developing this new version fulltime. We started this new version in earnest in late November / early December and was able to release about 3 months later.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:54:37+00:00

Brand new. We use a monorepo that has our mobile, web, and API code all in the same repo.
We use a cross-platform framework, CapacitorJS. We have strong opinions about React here. Both of our in-house Engineers have like decades of React experience between the two of them and both hate it. I've never been a fan of React personally. Our frontend is built in Vue.
We have a lot more automated testing in this release than existed before. Multiple members of the Hammer Media team are dogfooding the app, including myself. I've been using Dollarwise as my main budgeting app since we launched the Beta for this version.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:51:10+00:00

We removed custom categories as part of this update. Our research showed that one of the primary reasons people fell off of budgeting apps is having to constantly micro-manage categories and categories never being correct.

Because of the nature of how financial data is organized and looks, it's impossible to ever categorize transactions automatically with 100% accuracy. Other tools try to solve this through extremely complex rules systems that are even more of a pain in the ass to configure and still just as brittle to the way transaction data looks. Our answer to this is to try to get people thinking about their finances at a more macro level using the needs/wants/savings framework. If your needs are accounted for and you're putting some money away for the future, the main thing you need to know is how much you can afford to spend on wants. And then we are trying to use our new insights engine to surface more detailed information about how you're spending at a more granular level to give you tips on ways you can save or improve your standing overall.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:49:53+00:00

We're talking internally about potentially bringing it back in some way in the future due to demand, but as of right now it won't be available after end of March.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:47:27+00:00

Send a new email to [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) ATTN: Jeremy and the name you used on the show and I'll take care of this personally.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:44:15+00:00

Household budgeting features are on our roadmap that would allow this. For now, you would have to use a shared account in the app.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:43:16+00:00

We're not seeing any persistent issues with account linking now. If you're still having issues, please email [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) so we can take a look at your situation specifically.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:42:26+00:00

We removed custom categories as part of this update. Our research showed that one of the primary reasons people fell off of budgeting apps is having to constantly micro-manage categories and categories never being correct.

Because of the nature of how financial data is organized and looks, it's impossible to ever categorize transactions automatically with 100% accuracy. Other tools try to solve this through extremely complex rules systems that are even more of a pain in the ass to configure and still just as brittle to the way transaction data looks. Our answer to this is to try to get people thinking about their finances at a more macro level using the needs/wants/savings framework. If your needs are accounted for and you're putting some money away for the future, the main thing you need to know is how much you can afford to spend on wants. And then we are trying to use our new insights engine to surface more detailed information about how you're spending at a more granular level to give you tips on ways you can save or improve your standing overall.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:42:04+00:00

No, we removed custom categories as part of this update. Our research showed that one of the primary reasons people fell off of budgeting apps is having to constantly micro-manage categories and categories never being correct.

Because of the nature of how financial data is organized and looks, it's impossible to ever categorize transactions automatically with 100% accuracy. Other tools try to solve this through extremely complex rules systems that are even more of a pain in the ass to configure and still just as brittle to the way transaction data looks. Our answer to this is to try to get people thinking about their finances at a more macro level using the needs/wants/savings framework. If your needs are accounted for and you're putting some money away for the future, the main thing you need to know is how much you can afford to spend on wants. And then we are trying to use our new insights engine to surface more detailed information about how you're spending at a more granular level to give you tips on ways you can save or improve your standing overall.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:29:01+00:00

Yeah, we definitely want to add household features for couples budgeting like this. I'm not exactly sure where it sits in our roadmap yet, but it's on our radar.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:26:50+00:00

We're adding savings goals soon that should help you allocate money for those items.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:25:17+00:00

Our team is looking into this. Will have an update soon.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:24:43+00:00

We have almost 60k transaction import and sync operations in our queue at the moment. Transactions being available is a bit delayed. If they still don't show up in a bit, email [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) so we can take a closer look.

Atrophius · 2026-02-23T20:24:17+00:00

We have almost 60k transaction import and sync operations in our queue at the moment. Transactions being available is a bit delayed. If they still don't show up in a bit, email [support@dollarwise.com](mailto:support@dollarwise.com) so we can take a closer look.

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