TipBop
Tap-to-tip for hospitality staff.
2026
Eleven pieces of psychology we design with, and where to see them
Deep diveA field guide to the design psychology behind our apps and sites: the published source for each idea, the screen where we used it, and the dark-pattern version of it we will not ship.
Six months in, by the numbers
By the numbersMediant Partners Ltd was incorporated on 11 May 2026. Six months on: 195 repos, 5,795 animal logs in ZooLog, 4,710 commits in the five repos we work in most, and a November repo count that needs an asterisk.
The entitlement arrived. The feature still is not live.
Field notesOn 6 November Apple granted the Tap to Pay entitlement we had asked for since September. Workers still cannot use it, because the build sitting in Apple's separate App Store review would lose its place in the queue if we swapped it now.
Postgres to D1, with the rollback timed first
Deep diveD1 has no interactive transactions, and TipBop's payouts relied on them. How we moved a tipping app in beta off Postgres in a day: a lease row for the locks, one schema for 37 migrations, and a rollback we timed before we needed it.
The outage that moved us to Cloudflare
Decision recordAt 06:02 a Google Cloud zone stopped answering and took two products, both still in beta, with it. Our own review said stay and pay for high availability. By 15:45 we had left anyway. Here is the reasoning, and the objections to it.
A green health check and an empty database
PostmortemTipBop moved to Cloud Run on 17 September with a test-mode Stripe key, placeholder secrets, no data and no photos. The health check said ok the whole time. What it was checking, what it should have checked, and the two guards we added.
The customer pays the fee, so the worker gets every penny
Decision recordOn a £5 tip the customer pays £5.60 and the worker gets exactly £5.00. Taking a cut out of the tip instead loses money on small tips and breaks the one promise TipBop makes. Here is the arithmetic.
Tappy was taken, so we became TipBop
Decision recordWe built our tipping app as Tappy on 21 August 2026. Fifty-eight hours later it was TipBop, because the old name belonged to somebody else. How we screened more than 60 names, and why the code still says tappy.