Why I Built Sahod PH

I've spent a good chunk of my career building and maintaining finance systems — the kind of software that quietly computes payroll, contributions, and withholding tax in the background so nobody at a company has to think about it. What struck me, doing that work, was how little of that computation ever made it back to the actual employee. You get a payslip with numbers on it. You mostly just trust them.

Sahod PH started as an attempt to close that gap. Not to replace payroll software — to give any individual a way to run the same computation themselves, in a browser, and check the numbers against what they're actually being paid. SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, and BIR withholding tax under the TRAIN Law aren't conceptually hard, but they're tedious enough by hand that almost nobody actually verifies their payslip line by line. A calculator removes the tedium. What's left is just: type in your salary, see the breakdown, know it's right.

That first version was one tool — the income tax calculator that's still the core of the site today. It grew from there mostly by following the same question outward: if you're checking your take-home pay, you're probably also wondering what your 13th month looks like after tax, what a loan payment actually costs per month, or whether a digital bank's advertised rate survives the 20% withholding tax. Twenty-two calculators later, that's the full set — and I'm still adding to it whenever I run into a computation that deserves its own tool instead of a mental estimate.

El Cabana joined not long after, bringing the side of this I don't have: hands-on finance experience that keeps the tools honest about how compensation and taxation actually work in practice, not just how the law reads on paper. Most of what's accurate about the guides that explain each computation is because of that.

What Else I've Been Building

Sahod PH isn't the only thing I've shipped. Two other projects, both built the same way — solve one problem well, ship it, keep it simple:

• babypop.app — a gender reveal app for expecting parents planning their reveal moment.
• justplay2048.com — the classic 2048 puzzle, browser-based, with the following variants if the original ever gets stale: 3x3, 5x5, 1024, 8192, Fibonacci, and a personal favorite, Hexagonal.

Different problems, same instinct behind all three: take something people either do manually or pay too much attention to, and make the tool that gets it out of the way.

If you've been using Sahod PH and something's ever felt off — a number that doesn't match your payslip, a calculator you wish existed — the contact page reaches me directly. That feedback loop is most of how this site has actually grown.