How We Built Memophant: A Private Renewals Dashboard
Why I built it
Subscriptions creep up on you. A streaming service here, a software licence there, an insurance policy that renews quietly every year. Then there are the dates that really matter and are easy to forget: passports, driving licences, home insurance, the MOT on the family car.
I wanted one private place to see what I actually pay each month and what is coming up next.
The goal was simple: help people track their subscription costs and important documents on time. That became Memophant.
Our Lovable apps, until Memophant, had primarily been IT Monitoring and Management solutions,so this was a fresh challenge in terms of scope and style.
What Memophant does
A clear dashboard. Your monthly and yearly spend, worked out from whatever billing frequency you pay on. Weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual costs all become one comparable figure.
One total per currency. If you pay in pounds and euros, you see two totals. Memophant doesn't guess exchange rates.
What renews soon. Lists for the next 7 and 30 days, so you can cancel or switch before you are charged.
Spending by category. A simple chart shows where most of the money goes.
Life-admin reminders. Passports, licences, insurance and more, with past and upcoming dates highlighted.
Vehicles. Each car has its MOT details, renewals, insurance and finance in one place, with a total monthly running cost.
There are no bank connections. You enter everything yourself, and it stays private to your account.
The part which took the longest was finding a suitable domain name and product name.
Building it with Lovable
I started with a written brief: the pages, the fields, the rules for calculating spend, and the requirement that each person's data is private. Lovable turned that brief into a working app, and from there the work was a conversation. SystemAssure ITSM is a Lovable Partner so it was the obvious choice.
Some of that conversation was about look and feel. The first version was called RememberThat. When I compared it with a similar product, it felt too close in colour and layout, so we rebranded to Memophant: navy and amber, a dashboard-style home page, and a friendly elephant mascot. When I noticed the elephant disappeared on phones, we brought it back, because it is a big part of the identity.
Much of it was small, practical polish that comes from using the app every day. Dates now read as "11 Aug 2028" rather than an ambiguous string of numbers. Vehicle costs line up in a single column with the monthly total underneath. Each of these took a sentence to ask for and minutes to see in place.
Privacy and security from day one
Because Memophant holds personal details, security was part of the brief rather than an afterthought:
Data is stored in Europe.
Every record belongs to the signed-in person, and the database itself enforces that nobody can read or reassign someone else's data.
Personal details such as notes, document details and vehicle registrations are encrypted before they are stored.
Every form checks what is typed in, with sensible length limits and protection against malicious input.
Changing an existing record asks you to confirm and leave a short edit note, so there is always a record of what changed and why.
The site sends security headers that stop it being embedded in other sites to trick people into clicking things.
One decision I'm glad we made early: when a security scan flagged some outdated building blocks, the safe short-term option was to hold a few back. I chose to upgrade everything to the latest versions and update the code there and then. With an app nobody depends on yet, that is cheap. A year from now it would be technical debt.
Official MOT data
For vehicles, I wanted Memophant to fetch MOT details automatically so people only need to provide their vehicle registration number.I didn't want people to have to find the last MOT and work out when the renewal was due.
The tempting shortcut was to read the public GOV.UK results page. Instead we applied for access to the official DVSA MOT History API. Scraping a web page is fragile and not permitted; the official service is reliable and designed for this.
People type registrations in all sorts of ways, so Memophant tidies them first: ZZ99 ZZZ becomes ZZ99ZZZ before the lookup. The app then fills in the make, model, colour and MOT expiry, creates the MOT reminder for you, and shows the full MOT history. Click any past test to see its advisories and defects in DVSA's own words.
Help and What's New
We also run SaaS Sentinel, another Lovable app we built for managing SaaS Portfolios. It's built-in help and release notes worked well, so we brought both across into Memophant. With Lovable it is really simple to import features from other projects so it was working in a few minutes.
Every signed-in page in Memophant has its own help article, searchable from anywhere in the app.
A What's New panel tells you when something has changed, and release notes can be drafted from our development history so they are quick to keep up to date.
As Lovable builds the app it updates the inline Help as it adds new features and capabilities.
What's New is built automatically from the code updates in the version control system.
What's next
Memophant is in its early days, and the goal stays the same: fewer missed renewals and fewer surprise charges. If you want one calm place for your subscriptions and important dates, try it at memophant.app. I'd love to hear what you think.
