The question at the table

Tilted started at a table while I was out drinking with friends. A few of them pulled out their phones and started gambling, and after a few wins and a few more losses, I asked how far up or down they were for the night. Everyone gave me the same answer: "I don't know." That answer stayed with me because it was easy to imagine how often people were spending money without ever seeing the full picture.

Awareness, not encouragement

I had already been looking for an app to build. My first idea was a simple finance tracker with an AI in it, inspired by following Bryl Lim and his app Tarsi during my hackathon days, but that night changed the target. I spent a few weeks researching the space and found a couple of gambling trackers, although none of them worked the way I wanted. The problem felt underserved, so I decided to build the version I would have wanted to use.

It is important to be clear about what Tilted is and is not. It is not here to make you gamble more, and it is not a quit tool. If you want to stop, use something like GAMBAN or talk to someone. Tilted is for awareness. The name comes from poker, where going "on tilt" means playing emotionally and recklessly, and the app is meant to show you when and how that pattern is happening so you can be more responsible with your money. It is for the casual gambler who simply wants to know their number, as well as the disciplined one who treats the habit like a spreadsheet.

Make logging easy, keep data private

The thing I care about most is making a session quick enough to log in about a minute, because if the process is slow, nobody keeps doing it. Everything stays on the phone, encrypted and protected behind a biometric lock, so nothing leaves the device. There is also an AI assistant that can answer questions about your own data, whether you want to know how you are doing this month, whether you have been chasing losses, or where the money actually went. The goal is a private answer that is available immediately.

Shipping the whole thing

I built the app in React Native and the marketing site in Astro, doing the whole thing solo, including the parts I did not expect when I started. Development was the fun part, especially with AI helping me move quickly. The harder part came afterward: publishing, deployment, and finding people who would actually use it. I handled the marketing myself too, and that turned out to be a separate skill I had to learn.

Tilted is currently in closed testing, so the thing I need most right now is more testers. iOS is coming once I have an Apple Developer account. If the problem sounds familiar, I would love to have you try it, and I am still grateful to Bryl Lim, whose work helped point me down this path in the first place.