Amank

What it was

Companies lose track of their SaaS. Subscriptions pile up across departments, unused licenses go unnoticed, and nobody knows what tools employees are actually using. Amank gave finance, IT, and HR teams a single dashboard to manage the full software portfolio — with Shadow IT detection, automated onboarding and offboarding flows, virtual payment cards per subscription, and usage analytics. The platform claimed to eliminate up to 35% of SaaS costs. Pricing started at R$500/month for up to 100 employees. Amank was acquired by BHub — an exit that merged the product into BHub’s suite.

My role

Co-founded and built the product, from zero to exit. Chose and implemented the full stack — an Elixir/Phoenix monolith backed by PostgreSQL, with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js on the frontend. Covered product, engineering, and go-to-market.

What I learned

The virtual payment cards feature sounded like a differentiator. In practice, it meant entering regulated territory: card issuance requires banking partnerships, compliance frameworks, and legal overhead that have nothing to do with building software. The cost and time to operate those pieces correctly is an order of magnitude higher than any other part of the product — and it doesn’t scale the same way code does.

The broader lesson is that fintech features carry hidden compliance costs that only become visible when you’re already deep in. Audit trails, data residency, PCI scope, partner contracts — each one is a project in itself. If I were starting over, I’d validate whether the card feature was the actual reason customers chose us before building it at all.