December 22nd Major Development Updates

Introduction

It is getting closer to the end of the year and our planned beta launch! I wanted to share a few updates on what we have been doing since the last update.

Dillon and I have been discussing how we want to approach the beta launch. Initially, we were going to open it up to anyone who wanted to sign up.

We're now thinking about doing a slow rollout, gradually accepting new users instead of opening the floodgates all at once. As a small team, this will let us test Copia with a smaller group and work through any issues more quickly.

One last thing I'll add before we get into some of the details of what we have been working on is that we established a goal of what we thought was "ready for beta" for Copia.

That was:

• Onboarding experience
• Copia workers
• Stripe integration

These 3 were what we identified as the 3 most important things to have in place before we could launch the beta. We rolled these all out late November.

This means we are ahead of schedule with our goals and it gave us some more buffer to work on a few other things we wanted to get done before the beta launch.

What has been done since the last update?

Provider Agnostic and Auto Deduplication

When I first established some of the initial code for Copia, I built it with the assumption that we will be able to use multiple financial providers. (i.e. Plaid, MX, Finicity, etc.).

We actually took this idea to another level and started building a system that will automatically deduplicate transactions and accounts from different providers.

This means that Copia will be able to connect to your Chase bank account with Plaid, then if you remove that connection and connect to your Chase bank account with MX, Copia will automatically know that those accounts and transactions are the same.

This is still in progress and is about 80% completed. We are good to release beta while this is still in progress.

One thing I want to add: no other budgeting tool does this. Monarch Money, Rocket Money, and other tools don't automatically detect duplicate accounts and transactions—you have to manually merge them. We're building this because we think it should just work automatically.

Application Polishing

We have been working on polishing the application across the board. This includes:

• Improved UI/UX
• Improved performance
• Improved reliability
• Improved security
• Improved scalability
• Improved maintainability

Receipt Scanning

Another major feature that is almost completed is a receipt scanning system. This will allow you to scan your receipts and have them automatically be associated with the correct transaction.

What's Next?

We feel pretty confident that we're ready to launch to a small group of users and are sticking to our end-of-year timeline for the beta launch.

We'll continue polishing the application to make final improvements before we open the gates. We're ready and excited to share Copia with our first beta users—and at $4.99/month, we think it's the most affordable full-featured budgeting app out there.

That's it for this update! We have been making great progress, and I am really excited about where Copia is heading. If you want to stay in the loop and be part of the journey, join our Discord. Thanks for following along as we build Copia.