Almost a year since I release kiracukai.my. Time to reflect on journey till today

Prologue

I started to pay tax at year 2018, in which my yearly salary already reach certain amount that requires you to pay tax. Everytime I see my payslip, I always wonder how do this calculation is being done. There is also already available online calculator such as Simple PCB Calculator by Jeremi Siong, but it has certain limitation that cannot solve my problem. To feed my curiosity, I did browse through LHDN website to see how these calculation being done.

I also interested how much actually I can get back after all tax relief given. So I have to do manual calculation through pen and paper, and it’s quite tedious.

The (short) journey and the fall

Being programmer, you always want to solve your problem (or scratch your itch) that can be solved in tech. Around August 2019, I have an idea to develop some sort of simple tax calculator. My idea at that time was simply using frontend to do all the calculation and don’t need any server side processing. At that time I only knew jQuery, hence the development is quite difficult to make the calculator more interactive. And with that, the development stop. End.

The rise

December 2020, the inner urge to build something come again. And actually this tax calculator idea never left my head. This time, I already learn more modern front-end framework, and I have more confident to do it like how I visualize in my head. I start to sketch how it’s going to be.

First sketch of KiraCukai unnamed tax calculator

It takes few days to actually wrap my head around to visualize and design the interface. After I got clear vision, then I start to develop.

On Christmas Eve, the source code is committed to GitHub.

Simple files, simple life, Simple Plan

Version 0.1.0 of KiraCukai, where the form is very basic

A day after Christmas, I asked my friend to actually polish the interface, and he agrees to do it. What you see today is actually his touch.

We plan to release it before New Year, so that people can actually use it and buy last minute things for claim. But being us we didn’t manage to release it accordingly. We went hiatus for a while due to our day job.

"Build in public" wannabe. Thanks to le wife for suggesting the book.

Only on February 2021 we resume it to final lap and actually publish it to public.

Finally, release to public 🙌

After the release, I asked another friend to polish more in terms of copy writing and some UX.

We also actually asked Amanz to promote our site. We got quite number of traffic during the launch.

ATH traffic so far

For tech nerds

As I mentioned earlier, I just need the front-end to do all the calculation. And there is no back-end involve. Framework and tools that we are using:

• Vue for front-end, with vue-router included
• Tailwind for CSS
• Laravel Mix for dev tools but no longer used it
• Vite for dev tools. It’s freaking fast for compiling JS stuff. You should check it out!
• Netlify for hosting the front-end
• Google Analytics for visitor tracking
• web3, blockchain. Kidding, just your normal boring tech stuff here

The rest

• We receive quote numerous good feedback, especially when it makes their life easy when come to tax calculation.
• We don’t plan to put any ads (for now), because… why not? But we actually asked for some donation through buymeacoffee to keep the site alive (Thank you contributors!)
• Used by UiTM students for their studies (Yes, really. We got email from the lecturer)
• Featured in Amanz and Ringgit Oh Ringgit

So.. what’s next?

As teased in my friend Facebook post, we plan to expand KiraCukai platform.

What is it? Watch this space!