HCB Mobile – financial app built by 17 y/o, processing $6M/month
Details
- External ID
- 46130260
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- HCB
- Website domain
- hackclub.com
- Launched
- Dec. 3, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 176
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9351145038167938
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey everyone! I just built a mobile app using Expo (React Native) for a platform that moves $6M/month. It’s a neobank used by 6,500+ nonprofit organizations across the world.One of my biggest challenges, while juggling being a full-time student, was getting permission from Apple/Google to use advanced native features such as Tap to Pay (for in-person donations) and Push Provisioning (for adding your card to your digital wallet). It was months of back-and-forth emails, test case recordings, and also compliance checks.Even after securing Apple/Google’s permission, any minor fix required publishing a new build, which was time-consuming. After dealing with this for a while, I adopted the idea of “over the air updates” using Expo’s EAS update service. This allowed me to remotely trigger updates without needing a new app build.The 250 hours I spent building this app were an INSANE learning experience, but it was also a whole lot of fun. Give the app a try, and I’d love any feedback you have on it!btw, back in March, we open-sourced this nonprofit neobank on GitHub. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Fintech
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- nonprofit financial app
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The Expo/React Native UI itself is largely standard, but achieving bank-grade Apple/Google push provisioning entitlements, native hardware bridge modules, and Tap-to-Pay hardware terminal integration requires non-trivial regulatory review and native module bridge code.
What it would actually take: The mobile app is built with React Native/Expo communicating with a backend financial API, requiring custom Expo native modules in Kotlin and Swift for hardware NFC interaction and PassKit integration. The bottleneck is the strict organizational vetting by Apple, Google, and card networks to obtain Push Provisioning entitlements and Stripe Terminal mobile SDK Tap-to-Pay permissions.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Shadow banning and censorship of certain language submissions, Lack of testing strategy for financial application handling $6M/month, Domain-based filtering and ghost posts on HN, Potential undisclosed financial links between HN and certain language projects, Missing CI/integration tests for maintainability
Feature requests: OTA updates for apps without app store friction
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 150 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 151 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 34 days after the earliest competitor.
- Personal Trainer · hn · 2026-05-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- SEOSMMBoost · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- An iOS budget app I've been maintaining since 2011 · hn · 2026-01-13 · 159 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Cadence Money · hn · 2026-07-29 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Money Hole · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I made a simulator for personal finance (5 year update) · hn · 2026-05-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Six years of running a period tracker app with no subscription, no ads · hn · 2026-08-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app · hn · 2026-02-24 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.