Today is a day that brings me immense joy: after months of building, refining, and testing behind the scenes, I am thrilled to announce that Yappa is officially live!

The backstory

Throughout my career as a freelancer, I kept running into the same frustrating issues:

• Needing my work calendar to block time automatically for personal events without having to manually duplicate entries across calendars.
• Finding a way to display my real-time availability directly in a client’s account.
• Enabling others to book meetings when I’m actually free.
• Tracking time spent on client work and generating timesheets to streamline billing.

At this point, you might be thinking, "There are already tools for that", and you’re right. I’ve actively used Clockwise, Calendly, Toggl Track, and others. But as a freelancer, I found myself needing to combine several tools just to get all the functionality I needed. On top of that, juggling multiple clients often pushed me beyond the usage limits of those tools, requiring me to upgrade to more expensive plans.

In July, I decided enough was enough. It was time to build a solution tailored specifically to the unique needs of freelancers, and that’s how Yappa was born. Yappa, or more formally, yappari, is Japanese for just as I thought or as expected, which felt like the perfect name. Freelancers deserve a toolset that anticipates their needs in one cohesive package.

The product

Yappa is designed to be a versatile productivity tool for freelancers, contractors, and anyone who manages multiple clients daily. Here’s what you’ll find at launch:

• Unified Calendar View: See all events across your connected calendars in one place, and log manual time tracking events effortlessly.
• Calendar Syncing: With customizable, automated calendar syncing, you can clone events across calendars to reflect your real availability accurately.
• Booking Links: Share public links with clients, allowing them to book meetings only when you’re available.
• Time Tracking: Track time on non-calendar events, so every moment is accounted for.
• Client and Project Tracking: Assign time entries and events to clients and projects, making it easy to generate reports and manage time allocation with Yappa’s insights.

And this is only the beginning! The journey has just started, and there are exciting features and enhancements in the works.

The technical details

I’ll dive into Yappa’s inner workings in a future post, but here’s a quick preview of what’s under the hood:

• Infrastructure: Digital Ocean App Platform.
• Technology: SvelteKit and Express.
• PropelAuth for authentication
• Infisical for storing sensitive information
• Loops as a lightweight CRM and for transactional and email marketing
• Stripe for payments
• NewRelic for APM and alerts
• docs.page for the wiki
• TailwindUI components for most of the UI

Ready to give Yappa a try?

If you’re ready to simplify your freelance workday and finally get all the productivity tools you need in one place, I invite you to give Yappa a try! Sign up here, and as a special thanks for being here from the beginning, use the discount code GHITESCUDOTCOM for one free month on me.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Here’s to smoother, smarter freelancing with Yappa!