November 22nd Major Development Updates

Table of contents

• Introduction
• AI Update
• Budget Page Improvements
• Dashboard Page Updates
• Gamification
• Sentry Errors, Logs, and Traces
• Migration from Auth0 to Clerk
• Migration from Express to Fastify
• What's Ahead?

Introduction

Hello! I am super excited to share some major development updates for Copia. We have been making incredible progress, and I wanted to give you a look at what we have been working on.

Major Milestone: Copia is Now Officially a Corporation!

This past week became a huge milestone for Copia, as our corporation filing was approved! This means that Copia is now officially a legal entity. It is a big step forward for us, and we could not be more excited about what this means for the future of our new company.

Completed Projects from Last Update:

First, let me give you a quick update on the 3 major projects that were in the last blog post.

• Automated sync: Completed!
  • This has been completed and tested. Your accounts will now automatically sync when Plaid notifies Copia, so you always have the most up to date information without lifting a finger.
• Stripe Integration: Completed!
  • Stripe integration has also been completed and tested. We are now able to manage subscriptions seamlessly, which means we are ready to open up Copia to the public soon.

AI Update

We now have the ability to create AI agents! The foundation is in place and ready to go. This builds on early experimentation with local LLMs, but we put it aside to focus on core features. Now that the core is solid, we are bringing AI capabilities back into the fold.

We just launched our first version of an AI agent with 2 capabilities:

• Analyze your financial data and provide insights
• Create personalized budgets based on your spending patterns

Here is what the AI agent interface looks like:

This is the absolute first version of this AI agent, the foundation, not final by any means. Think of it as our proof of concept.

I have been testing it myself, and here is what I found: I wanted it to analyze my spending over the last 2 months and create a budget that made sense for me. It was working! The agent was able to understand my spending patterns and suggest a budget that actually made sense for my lifestyle.

That said, it definitely needs a ton of improvements before it is ready for prime time. We are just getting started with this, and I am really excited about where we can take it.

Budget Page Improvements

Dillon worked his magic to give the budget page a smoother experience. The new design is cleaner, more intuitive, and just feels so much better to use. We focused on making it easier to see your budget at a glance while still having all the details you need when you want them.

The budget page now features a collapsible design that lets you see an overview of all your budget categories at once, or expand individual categories to see the details:

When you expand a category, you can see all the subcategories, spending progress, and transaction details:

Dashboard Page Updates

Dillon and I have been working on improving the dashboard page to make it more engaging and visually compelling. We wanted to give it more pizzazz and make it something you actually want to look at when you open Copia. The new dashboard is more dynamic, provides better insights at a glance, and just feels more polished overall.

The new dashboard features animated charts, real-time spending updates, and a more intuitive layout that makes it easy to understand your financial picture at a glance:

Gamification

Most of the budgeting tools out there do not have a concept of gamification, and we think that is a missed opportunity. Budgeting can feel like a chore, but what if we could make it more engaging and even fun? This is a concept we have been thinking about adding for a while, and we are finally starting to build it out.

We are planning to get a few of the gamification features implemented before the end of the year.

The first thing we are working on is a scoring system for your budget. The scoring algorithm is a bit complex, and we can have a future blog diving deep into it, but essentially it gives you a score based on whether you are underspending or overspending. The goal is to give you a clear, actionable metric that helps you understand how well you are sticking to your budget, and hopefully make the whole process more motivating.

Sentry Errors, Logs, and Traces

We implemented Sentry to help us track errors, logs, and traces in the application. This is a game changer for us. Having real-time error tracking and performance monitoring means we can catch issues before they become problems, debug faster when something does go wrong, and make sure Copia is running smoothly for everyone. As we scale and bring on more users, this kind of visibility into the health of the application will be absolutely crucial.

Migration from Auth0 to Clerk

As we prepare for public beta, we needed an authentication which has a few key features we were looking for that Auth0 did not have and Clerk did have.

The migration went smoothly! We are really happy with the decision as it would have been a lot more painful to try to do this migration once we had beta users. Clerk's feature set and ease of use align much better with what we need for Copia, and it will make it easier for us to build out more authentication features in the future.

Migration from Express to Fastify

More technical talk, but as we prepare for more users and higher traffic, we needed to ensure our backend could handle the load efficiently. We migrated from Express to Fastify to help us improve the performance of the application. Fastify is significantly faster and more efficient than Express, which makes it a great fit for Copia. This change will help us handle more requests, reduce latency, and provide a better experience for our users as we scale. Performance matters, especially when dealing with financial data, and this migration sets us up for success.

What's Ahead?

Public Beta:

The goal for Copia was to launch a public beta by the end of the year. We are actually ahead of schedule! The final piece we wanted to have in place was a polished onboarding experience that makes it easy for new users to get started.

This onboarding experience is currently in progress and is expected to be completed by the end of the week. We want to make sure that when people first use Copia, they have a smooth, intuitive experience that gets them set up quickly.

We are expecting to have a few beta testers when we do launch, and we have a few of them lined up already. We are really excited to get feedback from real users and see how they use Copia. There is nothing quite like watching real people interact with something you have built.

WIP Features

• Gamification: Making budgeting more engaging and fun
• AI Agent v1.5: Improving on our first version with better capabilities
• Receipt Scanning: Making it easier to track your expenses

Polishing

We are also working on polishing a ton of things in Copia as we get closer to the public beta release. Little details matter, and we want Copia to feel polished and professional when people first use it.

Snyk

We already use a few tools to help us find security vulnerabilities in our code, but we want to add Snyk to give us even more coverage on potential security vulnerabilities. Security is not something we take lightly, especially when dealing with financial data, so having multiple layers of security scanning is important to us.

Quiltt

Dillon and I came across a product called Quiltt.io this week. It is a tool that allows us to have a unified system that can talk to multiple financial data providers.

A lot of the other budget tools have architecture built around each individual financial data provider, which means they have to build and maintain separate integrations for each one. Quiltt.io allows us to have a unified system that can communicate with multiple financial data providers through a single interface.

By using Quiltt.io, we could save a lot of time and money building out the infrastructure to support multiple financial data providers. This would let us focus on building great features instead of managing integrations.

We are still exploring if it is the right fit for us, but if it is, we will probably start to implement it before the end of the year.

Coming Soon: Future Blog Topics

We have some exciting topics planned for future blog posts:

• Security and Privacy: Copia is actually doing a lot when it comes to security and privacy. This is something we feel we should be transparent about and share with potential users.
• The Budget Scoring System and Gamification: The first version of gamification is a bit complex and I would like to share more information about it. I also want to explain why we are doing it and what makes it different.

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.