November 9th Developer Update
Angel Davila••7 min readHello! I hope everyone had a great Halloween. Below you will find an update on what has been done over the last couple of weeks with a mix of major projects that are in progress, minor changes which are live and a splash of technical details.
Copia is going to start following the "Building in the Open" philosophy, which means being more transparent and sharing as much as we can about our progress through blogs, videos, and social media content.
Table of contents
Major Projects In Progress:
Major Projects Completed:
Minor changes completed:
- Recurring Transaction Page Improvements
- Dashboard Improvements
- Right-click context menu
- Website Overhaul
- Expand and collapse budget page
- Added a few new budget page options
- Bug fixes
Automated Sync
What is it: In the early stages of Copia, we had to manually hit a sync button to pull in transactions. The problem is that there was no way to know when transactions were ready to sync. That uncertainty can be frustrating.
We don't want to worry about manually syncing transactions every time, so we automated the sync process.
How it works: Plaid has a fancy system that can notify Copia whenever it is ready to give it new transactions. Copia now listening for those events, and when it receive one, it will automatically kick off a worker that starts the syncing process.
What in the world is a worker? Check out the workers section.
Why this matters: Manual syncing isn’t a great experience. Automating it simplifies financial management and reduces the amount of user intervention required.
Syncing your data should happen without you having to think about it!
Current Status: We have most of the code written for this, we are just working through some final testing and polish. Should be completed by the end of the week (Nov 14, 2025).
Stripe Integration
What is it: Copia will be using Stripe to collect payments from users. Currently Copia is in a closed beta with just the development team, but we want to open our doors to real users, and Stripe is enabling this.
Learn more about Stripe here
How it works: We will be creating products and prices in Stripe which will allow us to manage which features users have access to based on their subscription tier once we launch.
Why this matters: Once this is complete, we can open up Copia to the public and start accepting real users.
Status: All of the code for this has been written, and I was testing it on Saturday. I was able to successfully manage subscriptions in our sandbox environment. All that remains is final testing and polish, and it will be ready to go. I’m aiming to wrap this by the end of the week (Nov 14, 2025).
tRPC Migration
What is it: One of the things I've learned over the last five years as a software engineer is that oftentimes the most impactful and valuable work for a software product is the stuff you don't visually see, one of them being technical debt.
Technical debt is taking on debt in software to get tasks done faster, with the idea of paying it back later.
Justifying this work to management is not always easy because it is not always visible to the naked eye, but it helps the product quality in the long run.
That being said, last week I completed a HUGE migration of our server routing to a new tool called tRPC. I won't get into the details on what tRPC does exactly, but I will tell you why it's beneficial for everyone:
- It makes it easier to implement new features.
- It makes it easier for developers to maintain those new features.
- It makes the user experience so much better.
- Fewer bugs and errors.
- Better code organization and structure.
- Tons of new tools for developers.
- Users get things faster and more reliably.
That last point is the most important and often overlooked. When you reduce technical debt, you help everyone!
Why this matters: Users won't see the difference visually, but they'll benefit from faster development cycles and more reliable features.
Status: Completed! It's awesome.
Workers
What is it: A worker is a background job that runs automatically and is started either on demand or on a schedule, without blocking the main application. Think of it like having an assistant that handles tasks in the background while the app keeps running smoothly.
Since Copia was in early development, we didn't need workers, but now that we're getting closer to release, we need a way to handle background jobs like auto-syncing transactions.
Why this matters: Workers let us do heavy lifting behind the scenes so the app stays fast and responsive. This will be important when we have users.
Status: Completed!
Recurring Transaction Page Improvements
We released some visual improvements to the recurring transaction page to make it cleaner and easier to use.
Dashboard Improvements
The Copia dashboard was actually one of the first pages I built when I started working on this project, and it needed some love. It wasn't a priority since we were focused on getting a lot of the core features built.
During some of our discussions, we felt like what we had didn't feel valuable in the dashboard and didn't really serve a purpose when we used the product.
Dillon Streator had a few new ideas, not final, but something to play with and test. The new design is more focused on what actually matters when using the product.
This was the original dashboard for Copia:
This is the new dashboard for Copia:
It's definitely not final, but it's a good starting point.
Right-click context menu
The transaction page now has a right-click context menu for quick filtering actions. Still needs to be polished a bit, but the core foundation is there for future improvements.
Website Overhaul
There was a bunch of work done to the website to give it some love.
- Created a scroll story section on the home page.
- Changed how blogs are created and how they are displayed.
- Added team profiles to the about page.
- Cleaned up the wording on the home page.
Expand and collapse budget page
The budget page now has an expand and collapse button for the budget list. This is a quick way to get a better view of the budget list.
Added a few new budget page options
The budget page still needs a few more features to be fully useful, but I added some new options that I needed while budgeting for October. These should make the budgeting process smoother:
- Create empty budget sheet
- Copy budget sheet
- Predict budget sheet
Bug fixes
- Fixed an issue where transactions weren't properly being removed when a bank connection was removed.
That's it for this update! If you want to stay in the loop, join our Discord. Thanks for following along as we build Copia.