looks like as of December last year (2025) I had been in Los Angeles 14 years. i think i’m allowed to call myself a local now?
anyhow payfrit has been brewing as an idea since 02/15 as an idea (stick) and Payfrit RMS first kicking around Jan 1 2016. payfrit.com registered originally on Aug 5, 2015.
i originally moved out here to frr my mind and come up with something new. did i?
last real days where i can make wholesale changes to our stack, apps, and multiple interfaces without having to worry about customers being live. it’s going very well. should have everything in place by the end of today, and be knees deep in app debugging.
feels good though. hard launch date set for no later than 2/24/26. goal is to have one each from the major categories ready to drop on that day:
i can make that happen, having HPC plus their referrals will be optimal.
we finally have a proper god mode in place, along with custom built monitoring of our api endpoints. full server stack is live and monitored. git properly organized and pushing properly on its own. finaly doing a major fix to quell all the different normalization/casing errors that were constantly fucking things up. probably 60% of our errors, at least, eliminated by a single codebase change. and finally able to make such a change because our server environment is stable.
payfrit is closer than it’s ever been.
time to fully test all six native apps today. i have specific test tracks already generated, time to do monkey work after bread & roses this morning. also building Payfrit’s god mode to make things easier to monitor and run.
yesterday we deployed the new custom performance monitor that keeps track of APIs and catches potential bottlenecks before they happen.
tying up loose ends. the flutter apps feel archaic at this point.
Payfrit is coming.
apparently when there is financial incentive to reduce homelessness, suddenly it happens.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-olympic-venues-unhoused-people-clear-encampments-plan
i am still on the fence wrt ai and where it’s headed. i have used it extensively to build Payfrit however i’m a bit of a special case. not tryna brag but i have detailed experience with low level programming and system design. logic skills, database skills, qa skills. business skills. learned life experience.
coding will be massive. old coding as we know it is simply dead. chat? well, you’re essentially looking at a conversational search engine. sure it’s nice but at this point it’s a commodity. is it worth it to pay for something it’s not that hard to get for free?
sure it will put support teams out of business. but that sort of thing was already available without LLMs. yes i know there are other applications and it’s going to change a lot of jobs and operations. but robots already started doing that decades ago.
i think what we are looking at is a shift. companies that utilize ai properly will gain advantages over those that don’t. but all this circular capital investment needs to shake out. there should just be a single open source free base level of LLM available for devs to use and build anything on it. apis only.
that and coding, separate animal.
on the whole, jury is still out in my book.
Payfrit is launching with a cool new option to work on fixing the problem of food insecurity. it’s called Community Meals.
my previous full time job was at a pizza place down at the Santa Monica pier. multiple times per day people would come in and ask if we had any waste food we could give them. or trying to get a slice for $2. asking for a cup of water.
what Community Meals does is this: Payfrit Restaurants create three menu items, breakfast, lunch and dinner. nutritious, simple meals that are easy to prepare. if a person experiencing food insecurity requests a meal, a payfritter will tap in their Payfrit Works app to generate a Community Meal food item. kitchen prepares it and it is delivered takeaway style to the person in need along with a large cup of water with or without ice.
an interesting note is that this meal is available to employees also. employee discounts are sort of meaningless if a person is at the point where they are food insecure. also discourages employee pilfering and is simply a dignified solution for everyone involved.
businesses that opt-in receive a fee discount of 0.5%, and users see a fee reduction of 0.5%. businesses that for whatever reason decide to opt out of community meals are charged this extra 1.0% and Payfrit donates it to a food bank nearby the restaurant. business is provided with reporting in order to still be able to take advantage of any potential tax advantages.
more info here
wow. what can i say.
a little over a month ago i quit my full time job in order to build and launch Payfrit. i had already built a small AA-related app project using chatgpt, and was in the process of learning claude.
signed up for claude on 12/29/2025. it’s now 1/28/2026. in that month i have done the following:
Payfrit has been simmering since roughly feb 2016 or so. at that time, smartphones were not as ubiquitous as they are now, especially with the 65+ age group. it wasn’t common for bluetooth to be active on a user’s phone. times have changed.
then came covid. a pivot to trying to use Payfrit Pads as a wedge, learning some good information to continue building the model. pivoting back to Payfrit as a food & bev/hospitality app wedge about six weeks ago. quitting the pizza job, last day of work was 12/23/2025. been building literally every day since then.
it’s paid off. finally tying up a few loose ends, preparing for a system that can easily manage the explosive growth we are going to experience. fully prepared for it. lfg.
-j