May 6, 2026
Gas, guilt, and gadgetry
What I Learned Making an App for My Family
Man builds family car app, commenters ask if he reinvented gas money with extra drama
TLDR: A developer built a simple app to stop family arguments over sharing one car, especially gas costs and who has it. Commenters stole the show by splitting into two camps: one said it’s a perfect small use for AI, while others joked he built a whole app just to avoid doing basic math.
A man got fed up with the age-old family fight — who used the car, who owes for gas, and why is the tank somehow always empty — and did what only a certain kind of determined person would do: he built an app. The project, called OurCar, was meant to beat the chaos of a family group chat by tracking the car’s status, location, parking spot, and fuel use. Sensible? Sure. But the comments quickly turned this wholesome DIY story into a delicious little showdown over whether this was clever problem-solving or a wildly overbuilt way to avoid basic arithmetic.
The loudest reaction was basically: this is exactly what AI tools are for. One camp cheered the app as a perfect small-scale use for tools like ChatGPT — a low-stakes helper for a messy real-life annoyance. They praised the author for using software to smooth over the boring parts and called it a sweet spot for “good enough” home-made apps. The other camp was far less impressed. One commenter roasted the whole adventure as “yak shaving,” mocking the fact that powerful computers were apparently summoned just to help name an app and avoid “one subtraction” and “one multiplication.” Ouch.
And that was the real popcorn moment: not the app itself, but the clash between “adorably practical family fix” and “bro built a whole product instead of doing math.” Add in deadpan jokes about an AI agent finishing the whole thing in a weekend, and the crowd basically turned a family gas-bill app into a referendum on modern tech obsession.
Key Points
- •The article describes how a family’s difficulty splitting shared car fuel costs led Mendel Greenberg to build an app.
- •The family considered calculating fuel use from trip odometer and efficiency readings, but the method was too inconvenient for everyday use.
- •Greenberg broadened the app’s purpose to also address car availability, location visibility, and scheduling conflicts.
- •He defined the project as building a car-sharing app that worked better for his family’s needs than a WhatsApp group.
- •The initial technology stack used for the project was PocketBase and Flutter, with Riverpod and Auto Route added later.