Monene.ru

A complex fintech product with zero tolerance for a clunky experience.

Monene approached HPACE with an ambitious vision: a single platform where individuals could plan monthly budgets, track multi-account savings, forecast years ahead and receive actionable recommendations — all in a consumer-friendly interface.

Existing personal finance tools on the Russian market felt either too simplistic or too bank-centric. Monene wanted the premium feel of a neobank combined with the editorial clarity of a productivity tool — and needed to get it right on the first release.

What success looked like.

• Ship a public MVP in 6 months

  Covering budgeting, savings goals and basic forecasting — production-grade, not a prototype.

• Handle 50k+ MAU without infrastructure rewrites

  Architect for scale from day one; no technical debt shortcuts.

• Achieve a daily-retention rate above 30%

  A strong indicator for a product category with historically low engagement.

• Prepare the platform for a Plus subscription tier

  Entitlements, billing and gated features built into the foundation.

An opinionated, editorial approach to personal finance.

We framed Monene as a calm, text-forward product rather than a dashboard. Large readable numbers, soft mint-green accent system, generous spacing, and a single interaction per screen — so users never feel overwhelmed by their own money.

Under the hood we built a modular platform: a Laravel + PostgreSQL core, a Vue 3 + TypeScript front end, and a dedicated forecasting engine. Monene Plus — the premium subscription — runs on the same entitlement service, so feature gating is a config change, not a deploy.

14 months, six phases.

• Discovery & research

  25 user interviews, competitor audit across 12 fintech apps, technical feasibility.

• Product strategy

  Feature prioritization by business impact × engineering cost. Year-one roadmap.

• Design system & UI

  Token-driven Figma library, 180+ screens across budgeting, savings and profile.

• Engineering — sprint 1–18

  Two-week sprints, weekly demos, staging from day three.

• Private beta

  500 users over six weeks. 41 usability issues triaged and fixed before public launch.

• Launch & growth

  Public release, analytics, dedicated support team embedded for ongoing iteration.

Chosen for maintainability, not trend.

A monolith by design — mature, fast to iterate, observability-first. We'll split into services only when the team and the data force it.

Shipped, scaled, and still growing.