Client: Self Initiated | Year: 2026 | Category: Product Design, Mobile | Platform: iOS | Status: Live at nomi-mu.vercel.app
A budget tracking app for the Indian market. One idea drove the whole thing: clarity over guilt. Track spending, understand patterns, see progress month over month. The app is live.
I built this because I wanted to track expenses without connecting my bank or managing syncs. Apps like Monefy exist but they are built for Western markets and feel adapted for India rather than designed for it. I wanted something that felt native from the start.
The most important design decisions in a consumer product are not visual. They are emotional.
Most budgeting apps start from the wrong assumption. They treat tracking as the goal, when tracking only matters if it changes how someone thinks about their money. The apps that exist show you what you spent, assign it a colour, and leave you to feel bad about it.
For a market like India, where financial apps are still earning trust with first-time users, that approach does not land. People do not come back to something that makes them feel worse. Anxiety is not a retention strategy.
The specific gaps that shaped the product:
Gamification does not translate. Streaks and badges work for habit apps. For financial tracking, they create a different kind of pressure. Missing a day feels like failure. The emotional cost outweighs the behavioural benefit.
Indian market specifics are ignored. Most budgeting apps are built for Western markets and adapted, if at all. Indian number formatting, Rupee symbols, and merchant ecosystems are treated as edge cases. For a first-time user in India, that gap is immediately noticeable.
Onboarding asks too much too soon. Setting up categories, connecting accounts, entering opening balances: most apps front-load the setup and lose users before they see any value.
The first and most important decision was what Nomi would not do. No income tracking. No bank integrations. No payment flows. No gamification mechanics that punish absence or penalise inconsistency.
Every feature that got cut was cut because it added surface area without adding clarity. A tracking-only app is a harder product to justify on a feature list. It is an easier product to use on a Tuesday evening when you just want to log what you spent.
Holding that constraint took real discipline. The scope kept wanting to expand. Each time it did, the question was the same: does this help someone understand their spending, or does it just add another thing they have to maintain?