Built by someone who's read a restaurant P&L at midnight
I'm the one person who designs, builds, and maintains BlueFin. No team, no investors, no roadmap meeting.
- one person, no team
- Solo-built
- one person, no team
- raised, spent, or charged
- $0
- raised, spent, or charged
- of the math runs in your browser
- 100%
- of the math runs in your browser
Why I actually built this
Every free financial calculator I could find assumes flat, steady revenue — divide the year by twelve and call it a month. Restaurants don't work that way. A patio restaurant's July doesn't look like its February.
That mismatch came into focus for me through hands-on time close to the restaurant and hospitality industry — close enough to see exactly where flat math quietly misleads owners doing their best to read their own numbers.
The blind spots I kept seeing
- Break-even calculators that ignore seasonality entirely
- Food cost tools that ignore shrinkage and waste
- No-show tracking that never becomes an actual dollar figure
I didn't set out to build a company. I set out to build the one tool I kept wishing existed.
How I decided to build it
As a developer, the decisions that shaped BlueFin were as much about what to leave out as what to build.
Private by architecture
No accounts, no database, no server that ever sees your numbers — not a policy, a structural fact you can check in your dev tools.
Free by design, not by favor
The same browser-only build that keeps this private also keeps it cheap to run. No per-user cost means no real reason to charge.
Narrow on purpose
Built around the actual shape of seasonal revenue, not a flat-average template with a seasonal patch bolted on. Slower to build, worth it.
Who this is for
Restaurants first, and the broader world of local, seasonal, volatility-exposed businesses that share the same underlying problem.
For the owners who use it: catch a bad month before it happens, or a margin leak before it eats the quarter. For me: a tool that quietly does its job at 11pm — the same way I once needed one to — is worth more than a tool that just looks good in a portfolio.
Where this is headed
A work in progress by design — one person shipping tools as I build and validate them. The next additions follow the same rule as the first: built for real, volatile revenue, or not built at all.