The first real documentation is up. Two pages, published before the features they describe are finished, because building in the open means documenting in the open. How SusuFinance works explains the product: what a susu is, how a circle will run here — invitation-only membership, verified payout addresses, contributions that move wallet-to-wallet with the app only keeping the book — plus the digital susu card, goal jars, exports you can take anywhere, and the five rules we will not break. And the Terms of Service were rewritten from scratch for this product: the not-a-bank/not-a-custodian/not-a-money-transmitter clause now states in legal language what the architecture already makes true, circles are recognized as private arrangements among their members, and the agreement says plainly that we assign no scores and keep no cross-circle reputation. Both pages are drafts in the honest sense — they will be refined — but the promises in them are not drafts.
Changelog
What's new, what changed, and why.
SusuFinance is live. This is day one: the domain, the name, and the code. What's being built here is a coordination tool for community savings circles — the susu of Ghana, esusu and ajo of Nigeria, chama of Kenya, tontine, sòl, kameti, mukando — on one non-negotiable rule: the app sees the circle; it never holds the pot. No custody, no keys, no wallet connections, no moving money. Members pay each other directly, wallet to wallet, and the platform keeps the circle's record: who's in, whose turn it is, where the payout genuinely goes, and whether it genuinely arrived.
The code is public from its first day at github.com/dstr88/SusuFinance. That's deliberate. A tool that asks a community to trust it with their circle's record should be readable by anyone in that community — trust what you can verify, not what you're promised.
The mark is a village well: members drawing from what they built together, with the circle of figures around its base — one gold, for whoever's turn it is. The name and the image both come from the institution itself, as described by the people who practice it: mutual support, pooling resources, being each other's keeper.
Practical notes for launch week: sign-in is closed while the circle features are under construction — the button is switched off on purpose, not broken. The service is unavailable in comprehensively sanctioned regions, as required by law. Everything else you see today is scaffolding from the codebase this project grew from; the circle tools are what come next, and they'll appear here as they land.