PayPls

PayPls started as an experiment. I was writing about AI-native PRDs and needed a real product to test the idea on. So I made up a bill-splitting app called PayPls — a chaotic, pop-art take on Splitwise for Gen Z friend groups. The PRD was meant to be the deliverable. The app was not.

But then I looked at what came out of the process and thought: this is actually buildable. The AI-native PRD had produced a fully specified product — data models, screen specs, API endpoints, brand guidelines, the lot. So I built it.

The stack is a TypeScript pnpm monorepo: React Router v7 with SSR for the web and marketing site, Hono for the API, and Expo for both the web app and native mobile. Data fetching is handled with TanStack Query. The whole thing is deployed on Cloudflare — Workers and Sites for compute, D1 (SQLite) for the database.

The brand is deliberately un-fintech: bubblegum pink, sun yellow, sticker shadows, sassy validation messages (“that email looks fake tbh”), and product copy that reads like a group chat (“pay pls”).

It’s live at paypls.lol.