Settling casual debts without the awkwardness.

Abstract

Most money lent between people who know each other leaves no trace. A friend covers your share of dinner; a cousin borrows for tuition; a workmate spots you for a concert ticket. The amounts are small enough to be informal and large enough to quietly corrode a relationship when memory and goodwill diverge.

kasama.loan is a free, mobile-first ledger for exactly these loans. Its defining mechanism is a two-way confirmation loop: a debt is only “real” once both parties have acknowledged it, turning a one-sided claim into a mutually agreed record. From that shared record, kasama can generate calendar reminders and tamper-evident PDF documents that either party — or a neutral third party — can verify. The service runs entirely on edge infrastructure, keeps money in integer centavos to avoid rounding drift, and is sustained by an unobtrusive free tier plus an optional Pro subscription.

The quiet cost of an informal “utang”

In Filipino, utang is a casual debt, and lending within one’s circle is woven into daily life. That informality is a feature socially and a bug financially. Three failures recur:

• No shared source of truth. The lender remembers ₱1,000; the borrower remembers ₱800, or remembers paying half back. There is no artifact both sides agreed to at the time.
• The awkwardness tax. Reminding someone they owe you money feels like an accusation. So people don’t — and the debt silently becomes a gift, or a grudge.
• No standing when it matters. For a larger sum, a verbal agreement offers nothing to point to if trust later breaks down.

Spreadsheets and notes apps solve only the lender’s memory — they are still one-sided. Formal lending apps over-solve it, importing credit checks, interest-by-default and collections energy that have no place between a parent and child. kasama sits deliberately in the gap: structured enough to be a record, light enough to use between people who love each other.

What kasama is

Kasama is the Filipino word for a companion — the person you are with. The name is the thesis: this is a tool for money between people who are already on the same side.

kasama is a tracker and an agreement layer, not a lender. No money moves through it. It never advances funds, charges interest, or pursues collection. It records what two people decided, helps them remember it, and — when they want — gives them a document to prove it. It is Philippine-first in language, currency formatting, and payment vernacular (GCash, Maya, bank transfer, cash), but nothing about it is country-locked.

Track casual loans and more, settled without the awkwardness.

The Confirmation Wall

The heart of kasama is a refusal to let one person unilaterally define a debt. When a lender logs a loan, it does not enter the ledger as fact. It enters as a pending request addressed to the borrower, who must explicitly confirm or reject it. Only on confirmation does the loan become active and start counting in either person’s totals.

This single design choice produces most of kasama’s value:

• Consent is captured at the source. The record exists because both parties said yes — not because one party typed it in.
• Disputes surface immediately, when memories are fresh, instead of months later at repayment.
• Symmetry. The borrower sees the same numbers the lender does, in their own app, with the same status.

The ledger lifecycle

Every loan is a small state machine. Beyond the active path, kasama models the full social reality of casual debt — including the graceful ways debts end without being repaid.

Pay

The borrower marks a payment — in full, or a partial amount — and the lender confirms it. Only confirmed payments move the balance.

Partial

A debt can be paid down in instalments: each confirmed payment shrinks the remaining balance until it reaches zero and settles.

Dispute

If a claimed payment never actually arrived, the lender marks “no payment received” and the loan returns to active — nothing settles on one side’s say-so.

Forgive

The lender writes the debt off deliberately — a first-class action, because “never mind it” is how a great many real loans actually end.

Hide

Remove a loan from your totals without forgiving it — a middle ground for debts you’re not chasing but don’t want to formally cancel.

Reject

The borrower disputes the request before it ever becomes active. Nothing enters the ledger.

Balances are computed from the event history rather than stored as a mutable number, and every amount is held in integer centavos — so repeated interest or split-the-bill math never accumulates floating-point drift.

Beyond one-to-one

Casual debt is rarely a clean pair of people. kasama scales the same confirmation principle up to groups and out to people who haven’t joined yet.

Joining an event is opt-in: a friend’s invite waits in a tray for you to accept, and a QR or share link lets anyone join directly. Settling is per-person and incremental — you clear only what you currently owe, a payment is final only once the person receiving it confirms, and a late expense re-opens just the people it affects while settled transfers stay put. The organiser can close an event to new expenses once the spending is done.

Receipt scanning sends the photo to a scanning AI only to read it into text, then discards the image — it is never stored. The parsed items are always shown in an editable list before anything is added, so a misread never silently becomes a debt.

Loans can be cash or an item (with an optional declared value for the record). Interest and instalments exist for the rarer, larger loan that genuinely needs them — opt-in, never the default, with custom repayment intervals bounded to a sensible 7–30 days.

Verifiable documents

For loans that warrant it, kasama generates a clean, formal PDF acknowledgement of the debt. Each document carries a SHA-256 fingerprint of its canonical loan data and a QR linking to a public verification page.

It is worth being precise about what this does and does not prove:

• It proves the record is intact. Re-hashing the loan data and matching the fingerprint shows the figures, parties and dates are exactly what kasama holds — the document hasn’t been altered after issue.
• It does not authenticate a screenshot. Anyone can photograph and edit an image; that forgery simply won’t match the hash on verification. The fingerprint is the source of truth, not the pixels.

Showing a counterparty’s verified email on a document is strictly opt-in, requested per loan from each party. Separately, when paying, a borrower may attach an optional payment-proof image for the lender to check — it auto-deletes about a week after the payment is confirmed, unless the lender keeps it.

Reminders & notifications

Chasing a debt is the awkward part, so kasama offloads it to tools people already trust. Each loan with a due date exports an iCalendar (.ics) entry — compatible with Google, Apple, and Outlook calendars — and every user gets a private, subscribable feed of all their upcoming due dates that refreshes on its own.

The reminder then comes from the borrower’s own calendar, not a guilt-laden message from the lender. Inside the app, a notification feed separates what needs you (a loan to confirm, a claimed payment to confirm) from what just happened (your loan was accepted, your payment confirmed, a debt forgiven) — the first is always derived from live state so it’s never stale; the second is a short, self-clearing history.

Trust & data ownership

A ledger of who-owes-whom is sensitive by nature, so the defaults lean private.

• Consent-gated sharing. Personal details such as a verified email appear on a document only when that person opts in, per loan.
• Your data is exportable. Users can download and extract their full ledger — kasama is a place to keep records, not a place that holds them hostage.
• No funds, no banking rails. Because no money moves through kasama, there is no balance to lose, freeze, or breach.
• Authentication via Google, with verified email as an opt-in layer for documents that need it.

Security posture

kasama runs as a single application on globally-distributed edge infrastructure, for low latency worldwide and cost that scales to near-zero at rest. Platform and implementation specifics are intentionally left out of this document — what matters to users is the security model, and that model is designed so the worst case stays small.

No funds

kasama never moves, holds, or can access money. There is no balance to drain, freeze, or breach — the blast radius of any incident is a record, not a peso.

Minimal data

Accounts are created through a trusted identity provider; kasama stores no passwords. Sensitive details such as a verified email are revealed only with explicit, per-loan consent.

Encrypted secrets

Every credential lives in an encrypted secret store — never in source, configuration, or logs.

Exact money math

All amounts are integer minor units (centavos) end-to-end, so interest and split math never drifts.

Tamper-evident records

Formal documents carry a content fingerprint anyone can re-check; the live ledger is the source of truth, not any copy of a document.

Bounded storage

Uploaded images sit in object storage behind a hard cap and automatic lifecycle cleanup, so cost and exposure stay bounded; payment proofs auto-delete shortly after a payment is confirmed.

Capability links

Invite/claim links are unguessable, single-purpose, and time-limited — holding one only lets a signed-in person claim that one record.

The core logic — the verification state machine, balance computation, and group clearing — is isolated from infrastructure and covered by a deterministic test suite on every change, so correctness never depends on any single platform.

Sustainability & pricing

kasama must pay for itself without compromising the casual experience. The prime directive on monetisation is restraint: ads are inline and unobtrusive only — never pop-ups, interstitials, or anything that interrupts the core flow — and Pro removes them entirely.

Three revenue lines — restrained ads on the free tier, the Pro subscription, and pay-per-document — are deliberately layered so the product can cover its edge-infrastructure costs before it is widely known, while keeping the essential tracker free.

Roadmap

• Today: live web app, installable as a PWA, on a custom domain.
• Near term: the move to the kasama.loan domain; deeper group-split flows; richer document options.
• Planned: native Android and iOS applications.
• Ongoing: sharpening the product’s identity against the everyday ambiguity of the word “kasama,” and broadening beyond the Philippines without losing the local feel.