RailBird is a poker payouts calculator for home games, streamlining cash-out balance reconciliation. Create a League, input game details, and use "Calculate Payouts" to notify players of their owed balances, leaving the comment chains and spreadsheets behind.
Hey everyone 👋 I'm @koshy - Principal iOS Engineer @ Favor Delivery and founder of the RailBird Poker app.
I've been working on iOS applications going back to the iOS 4.0 days when I founded NativeInk, a small design & development agency helping startups launch their initial products. Eventually, I joined Favor Delivery during their Series A, and today, I support our teams internally as part of the Developer Experience team.
I've always dreamed of launching a product of my own that leverages my career learnings, focused on a compelling idea I'm passionate about. That idea finally came to me after moving to Austin and forming a weekly poker game with some friends. As the host, I quickly found that taking financial responsibility over the game’s ability to satisfy all payouts at the end of the night was not one that I wished to carry for much longer.
And so began RailBird - a quickly scrapped together iPad app that I brought down with me to the tables to serve as a glorified spreadsheet for keeping everyone’s buy ins and cash outs straight. A few redesigns and technical overhauls later, and RailBird is finally live on the App Store as an iPhone app with a generalized feature set to help any host reconcile their home game payouts.
I'm excited to hear your thoughts, especially from fellow product & engineering enthusiasts who may have personally felt the burden of managing poker game finances themselves!
What’s up next?
- Support for game types other than cash games (namely tournaments)
- All the fun stats and graphs that can be made available to players for tracking in-game performance
- Improved event management features allowing for scheduled games and planned attendance
- Web app support for sharing payout results with users who don’t have iPhones
- Experimentation with different pricing models, allowing larger groups to offset the cost of access for their members
@pipsai glad to hear! That was a huge motivation for me as well in building it for our games. Despite the best of intentions, it continued to happen more often than we would have initially expected.
I've noticed that it's not only the counting of chips at the end of the night that can tend to be error prone, but also the initial counting of chips as players walk over to the case to pick up a re-buy. I'm working on another feature to facilitate this process as well that I hope to launch soon!
@jonte unfortunately I don't currently have concrete plans in the short term to begin development on Android as I'd like to bring a minimal version to web first, but I am attempting to gauge interest in it here and certainly hope to release on Android at some point in the future!
https://railbird-poker.canny.io/...
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