Income in Motion: Introducing GigFin
Working across multiple gig platforms has been quietly reshaping the texture of my days. Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Amazon Flex and a few others I am still in the process of joining have become the moving parts of my working life. As the number of apps increased, so did the mental overhead of trying to understand what I was actually earning. I started, as many people do, with an Excel sheet filled with formulas and colour-coded cells, but after a while it became more of a burden than a tool. Updating it on the go felt cumbersome, switching devices meant friction, and a system that was supposed to give me clarity began to feel like yet another task on the list.
Out of that frustration, GigFin was born. I wanted something that reflected the reality of gig work: fragmented, mobile, often done in short bursts between other responsibilities, sometimes in places with unreliable connectivity. GigFin is a web-based app I can open from any device, but it is deliberately designed with minimal dependencies on external services so that it can function in constrained or even offline environments. That design choice is one of the main reasons I opted for SQLite rather than a heavier, externally managed database. SQLite lets the app remain lightweight, portable and resilient; it keeps the data close, simple and easy to host without having to stitch together a complex infrastructure just to keep track of numbers that should never have been this hard to see.
At the moment, GigFin focuses on a single core responsibility: tracking income. It is not trying to be an exhaustive financial suite or yet another over complicated dashboard. Right now, it offers a straightforward overview of your earnings: a simple dashboard with a pie chart, a line graph and a handful of key statistics that provide a quick sense of where your money is coming from and how it is evolving over time. It is intentionally minimal in this early stage, because I wanted to get the foundation right before layering on more complexity. Even in this first iteration though, it has already made my own working life easier. Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets after a long day, I can glance at a single screen and feel grounded in the numbers.
There is, of course, a roadmap. I want GigFin to grow into something more flexible and expressive, especially for people who, like me, live between multiple platforms and need tools that can adapt to their patterns rather than forcing them into a rigid mould. I am planning to build a fully customisable dashboard with drag-and-drop components so that each person can choose the charts, stats and views that matter most to them. I want to add shareable URLs so you can create read-only views of your data for specific periods and share them with an accountant, a lender or even just keep them as a personal snapshot. Exportable PDFs and CSVs for selected date ranges are also on the list, because sometimes you do need to take your data elsewhere, whether for tax returns, personal reviews or long-term record keeping.
Expenses are a slightly different story. There are already many services that handle expense tracking quite well in a general sense, so I am not trying to reinvent that entire wheel. Instead, my focus will be on the kinds of costs that are tightly coupled to gig driving and delivery work: vehicle upkeep, maintenance, fuel, tyres and other recurring burdens that silently erode profit. I want GigFin to help calculate and visualise key performance indicators such as cost per mile versus profit per mile, so that the invisible friction of wear and tear becomes visible in the same way income already is. That, to me, feels more honest to the reality of gig work: it is not just about what you earn, but what you give up in time, energy and hardware to earn it.
True to the spirit of Valeon and to how I like to build things, GigFin is completely FOSS (free and open source). You can clone the repository, study the code, run your own instance or extend it to suit your own needs by heading to the GitHub repo. If you simply want to use it without worrying about deployment, I have also made a hosted instance available at gigfin.me. The tech stack is intentionally modern yet accessible: Next.js, React, TypeScript, BetterAuth, Drizzle ORM and SQLite form the backbone of the project. If you are a developer, designer or just someone with an idea for how this could better serve gig workers, contributions are not only welcome but encouraged. Gig work is, by its nature, decentralised and fragmented; it feels fitting that the tools we use to navigate it are built collectively, in the open, with an eye toward clarity, dignity and a little more ease in the everyday work of making a living.
