A new app created by a local resident aims to help small business owners save more of their hard-earned money.
Travis Glowasky of the Rainy River District set out to make an app that wasn’t subscription-based, didn’t steal customers’ data, and worked with or without an internet connection. Despite rejections from funding groups for the app, Glowasky made Kajigger, a time-tracking and invoicing app that could help small businesses give accurate invoices and put money back in their own pockets by ditching the subscription model.
“Basically, what it is, Kajigger, is a Mac OS desktop project time-tracking and invoicing app,” said Glowasky.
“It doesn’t do the billing. It does the invoicing. So, it generates a PDF invoice for all the work that you’ve put into [a project.]”
Glowasky said the project came out of a lack of programs that had all the features he was looking for.
“The need of it came out of the for the fact that I’d bought a new computer a couple years ago, and I was using a program that no longer exists to do all of my project time-tracking and invoicing. It no longer exists,” said Glowasky.
“I tried contacting the developer. I said, ‘Hey, would you like to do something together, get this thing figured out?’ And he’s just like, ‘I have no interest anymore. I’ve moved on to other things.’ So, I reached out to my Tiktok community, because that’s where all this kind of started. I reached out to them to say, ‘What are you guys using?'”
While Glowasky received a number of suggestions, none of them were to his liking.
“There were suggestions like, Toggle, Clockify, Harvest, all the big name things,” said Glowasky.
“They all had the same fundamental problem. One, they were all subscription based. Two, they were all online. The thing that really pissed me off the most was I don’t have access to my data. My data is not mine. I don’t like that. I don’t want somebody knowing, like, ‘Hey, I have Client X,’ because we do a lot of marketing for a lot of the healthcare industry around here, as well as a lot of the resorts, and I don’t want somebody somewhere knowing that.”
For a time, Glowasky was stumped. But, he learned some coding to put this project of his together.
“I was asking people like, ‘What is there?’ Nobody could name anything. So I just started trying to learn Swift code. I got to a point to where I had something, but I needed extra help. I found a gentleman who was willing to help me out to push it even further, and we got to this point. So, now we have this app,” said Glowasky.
“There’s no subscriptions, there’s no limits on clients or projects. There’s no accounts required, so you don’t have to set up account. You download it, you put in your business information and you don’t need to have internet access.”
All these features were important to Glowasky because he didn’t want to pay for a subscription monthly, or need an internet connection in order to access an app he needs for business purposes.
“Your data is yours. It’s 100 per cent secure. Mind you, [for now,] you do have to back it up. I’m working on adding new features to it, such as [a] CSV backup, so that there is a universal export,” said Glowasky.
“So, if you need to move your data to a different application, you have that.”
Glowasky is already planning an update for the app that could aid businesses in filing their taxes.
“Then there’s also going to be a new feature that I’m planning on already,” said Glowasky.
“I’m still working it out in Figma for a small business when they have to go file their taxes so that they can export everything out for themselves to see, ‘Okay, how many projects that I have in this quarter, this year, this period that they can export in?’ I haven’t built it in just yet. I want to get it out there and get some feedback [first.]”
Before building Kajigger with money out of his own pocket, Glowasky sought out funding without any success.
“[Pretty much] everything was paid for by myself,” said Glowasky.
“I reached out to local and regional funding and grant organisations, and none of them wanted to do anything with it. They didn’t see the value in it.”
“One of the organizations that does provincial grant funding said, ‘We’ll support you so long as you turn it into a subscription based model,’” he added.
However, that wasn’t to Glowasky’s liking.
“I said, ‘Absolutely not. Small businesses are already suffering from subscription fatigue,'” said Glowasky. “I’m suffering from subscription fatigue … that’s why I thought, ‘Okay, let’s find a nice balance between all this. And we came up with $55.99 Canadian, and they keep it for life. If they use it for a year, it works out to be less than $5 a month. If they use it for two years, it works out to be less than $3 a month and so on.”
To learn more about the app, or to purchase a copy, visit www.kajiggerapp.com.
