I built Valuta, a currency converter with a calculator built in

I just put out a small, focused app called Valuta, a currency converter for iPhone.

I built it out of a specific annoyance: I travel and deal with more than one currency, and every converter I tried made me leave the app to do basic arithmetic. I would convert a price, then reach for the calculator to split it, add tax, or multiply by a quantity, then come back. Valuta puts the calculator and the conversion in the same place.

Valuta was built with a lot of AI help. More on that further down.

Why I built it

It is a deliberately small app. I did not want a finance dashboard or a portfolio tracker. I wanted the fastest possible path from "what is this in my currency" to an answer I can actually do math with, and I wanted it to keep working when my signal did not.

What it does

Valuta is built around four things:

• Live exchange rates with an offline cache, so recent rates are available even without a connection
• A built-in calculator keypad for doing arithmetic and conversion in one flow
• Saved currency pairs, so your most-used conversions are one tap away
• No account, no subscription: it is a one-time purchase, and your settings and saved pairs stay on your device

Works offline

Valuta caches recent exchange rates locally. When your signal is weak or gone (which, when you are traveling, is exactly when you need to convert something) it falls back to the most recent rates it fetched. You are not stuck staring at a spinner in a shop.

Private and subscription-free

There is no account and no sign-up. Your settings and saved currency pairs are stored locally on your device and never sent to a server. And it is a one-time purchase rather than yet another subscription, which felt like the right model for a utility this focused.

Building it with AI

For an app this small, AI mostly meant I could go from idea to a polished, shippable App Store build in the little time I had, instead of letting it sit as a someday-project. The rate-fetching and caching, the calculator logic, and the React Native UI came together far faster with AI in the loop. The decisions that made it worth shipping (calculator-first, offline by default, one-time purchase, no account) were mine.

Availability

Valuta is available on iPhone, with an Android version in progress:

• valuta.montalesi.dev

If you have ever converted a price and immediately needed a calculator, that is the entire reason this app exists.