Paagos — AI-Native Accounting SaaS
Designing and building an accounting platform for Philippine small businesses with a two-tier AI architecture.
Overview
Paagos is an AI-native accounting platform designed specifically for Philippine SMEs. It’s not a localized version of QuickBooks — it’s built from the ground up for how small businesses here actually operate.
Why This Exists
Philippine small businesses have unique accounting needs — BIR compliance, mixed cash/digital transactions, informal bookkeeping practices that need to be formalized without friction. Existing solutions are either too expensive, too complex, or designed for a different market entirely.
Architecture
The system is built on a stack optimized for cost efficiency and performance at the edge:
- Hono on Cloudflare Workers — single server, edge-first architecture. No cold starts, no scaling headaches
- PlanetScale Postgres for the data layer — reliable, scalable, with branching for safe schema evolution
- TanStack Start on Cloudflare Pages — type-safe, server-rendered frontend
- Two-tier AI architecture:
- Invisible AI — open-source models via Workers AI handling automation (categorization, data extraction, anomaly detection)
- Active AI — frontier models via Mastra for user-facing intelligence (natural language queries, financial insights, conversational bookkeeping)
Design Philosophy
The two-tier AI approach is deliberate. Most AI-powered SaaS products bolt a chatbot onto existing workflows. Paagos treats AI as infrastructure: the invisible tier handles the boring automation that makes the product feel effortless, while the active tier provides genuine intelligence that users interact with directly.
Status
Currently in active development. I’m the sole architect and engineer — designing the database model, AI pipeline, infrastructure, and product spec from scratch.