u/Dear_Reflection2027

My girlfriend and I travel a lot. When we’re in a new city we never know what to do — we spend 30 minutes on Google and end up at the same tourist spots everyone goes to.
I’ve been building an app that pulls real local events from APIs (concerts, food nights, art shows, experiences) and lets you both swipe through them together. When you both say yes — that’s your night sorted. No planning, no negotiation, no “you decide.”
It’s called iLovu. Still in early development but I’m putting together a small waitlist.
If you’re in a couple and travel or move around a lot — is local event discovery something you struggle with? What would make this actually useful for you?

Three years ago I went freelance and immediately hit a wall I wasn't expecting.

Every time a client paid me, I'd stare at the number and genuinely not know how much I could actually keep. After Googling for 30 minutes I'd find some complicated tax calculator that asked me about pension contributions and whether I was married.

I just wanted one number: "here's what's yours, here's what HMRC/IRS gets."

So I built myself a spreadsheet. It's ugly. It has hardcoded tax rates I update manually every April. But it works — I log every payment, it splits it into "keep this" and "set aside this," and it shows me a running total of what I owe at deadline time.

I've been using it for three years and it's saved me from two potentially nasty surprise tax bills.

My question: is this just me, or do most freelancers end up doing something like this? Is there actually a good mobile app for this that I've been missing?

The stuff I've tried hasn't worked because:
- Most tools are US-only (I'm in the UK)
- The good ones require connecting your bank account (I don't want to do that)
- The simple calculators only work once, they don't track over time
- The full accounting suites (Xero, QuickBooks) are way more than I need

Curious whether others have the same experience or if I'm just doing this wrong.