Dejan Bogatinovski

Why I built Tavala

For years I tried to keep my finances in order, and for years no app did the whole job. I tried free ones and paid ones. Some were missing what I needed, some were too complicated, and some were simply unpleasant to use.

My own money is the reason. I have worked as a freelancer for more than ten years, paid in US dollars and euros. At home in Skopje I spend some of it in Macedonian denars and some directly in other currencies. My wife is from India, so we have small commitments there through the year, and every year we go and live there for several months, which is less a trip than a temporary move. In between there is travel to other countries, paid partly in cash and partly with my dollar and denar cards.

Then there are the debts: a mortgage, loans and credit cards. What I could never see was the whole picture at once: how much all of them take each month, and what I am actually worth once the apartment I own is set against what I still owe.

Tavala is the app I wanted for that life, and that life decided how it works. Most budgeting apps begin by asking for a bank login and stop working when the signal does; mine had to handle cash, several currencies and months abroad. So Tavala starts with a text field. Type "coffee 4.80" and it is saved on the phone in your hand, in any currency, with no account and no connection. I wrote up the reasoning, and what it costs to build, in why I built a money app that works with the network off.

I started in 2024. The first attempts did not last: I was interrupted, or something was not right, and I started again from scratch, more than once, until the latest attempt was going where I wanted. That is the Tavala you can use today.

Before Tavala

I studied at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering in Skopje, and I have built software for a living for more than ten years, almost all of it remote: full-stack web development for companies in the United States, Germany and Australia, cloud architecture on AWS and, more recently, CTO roles at startups. Besides Skopje, I have lived for a couple of years in India and for a few months in Australia. The full work history is on LinkedIn.

Where the numbers in these guides come from

When a debt guide here gives an interest total or a payoff month, it was computed, not estimated, by the debt engine of Tavala's payoff planner, the same code that runs the site's debt payoff calculator. Debt snowball vs avalanche runs it on three debts, then on 30,000 random plans.

The currency guides follow two rules the app keeps. Every amount is stored as a whole number of its currency's smallest unit, so totals agree to the cent on every device. And every entry keeps the exchange rate of the day it was paid, so last March's spending does not change when the rate does. Which exchange rate goes in a budget explains which rate to record, and why.

The privacy guides come from deciding what my own app sends, and to whom. Tavala works without an account, a bank connection is an optional add-on, and the AI model behind Ask Tavala never sees an amount. Is Plaid safe? looks at the other side: what a bank connection hands over, and how to take it back.

How I check a guide

Every guide starts from a written brief, and the first draft may be written with an AI model; each post says so under its title. Then I check every fact against the app or the source it cites, and edit the piece before it is published.

Sources are linked where a claim is made, and every price carries the date it was checked. When a guide compares apps, it says where another app is the better choice, Tavala's own gaps included. There are no sponsored posts, paid placements or affiliate links: Tavala earns its money from Plus and its add-ons, so no company pays to be in a guide.

If something here is wrong, write to support@tavala.io. I correct it and change the page's updated date. The rules in full are under how we write.