The problem
I managed restaurants and bars for a decade, and I've watched this scene hundreds of times: it's 1 a.m., the shift is over, everyone is exhausted, and someone is hunched over a calculator splitting the tip pool by role and hours while the rest of the staff waits to go home.
The math isn't hard. It's just the worst possible moment to be doing math.
About
Tip Out handles one small but familiar end-of-night job. Enter who worked, their role and hours, and the tip pool. The app calculates each person's share and saves the shift.
Everything stays on your phone. There are no accounts, cloud storage, or tracking. It costs $4.99 once, with no subscription.
Screens
How it works
Add staff & roles
Add everyone who worked the shift and assign each person a role.
Enter hours & tips
Enter each person's hours and the total cash and credit tips.
Review the split
Check each person's share, then save the shift for your records.
Key decisions
Charge once: $4.99
Tip Out has no servers or meaningful ongoing costs, so a subscription didn't make sense. I chose a one-time price that fits the product and is easy for a restaurant team to understand.
Keep the scope small enough to ship in two days
A tip calculator didn't need a long roadmap. My restaurant experience gave me a clear picture of the workflow, so I built it, tested the calculations against real tip-out scenarios, and submitted it to the App Store in under two days.
Results
- Under 2 days
- from idea to the App Store, including testing against tip-out workflows I had used in restaurants.