The trip is always the easy part. Ten days in the mountains, a beach house split six ways, a cousin's wedding that turned into a two-week reunion — none of that is what breaks people. What breaks them is the spreadsheet nobody wanted to make, the receipt someone swears they showed the group, the quiet math that turns into a not-so-quiet argument three weeks after everyone's home and unpacked.
Rashid Bahattab had watched it happen enough times to stop calling it bad luck. A wedding trip, sour by the time the flowers had wilted. A group of old friends who stopped being a group over four hundred dirhams nobody could quite account for. He didn't think the problem was the people. He thought the problem was that nobody had ever built something small enough, honest enough, to carry that weight for them.
So one evening, he called me.
He didn't pitch it like a business. He pitched it like a favor to everyone who'd ever come home from a good trip carrying a bad feeling. What if there were something that just quietly kept track — who paid, who owes, who's square — so the money never got the chance to outlast the memory?
I liked the idea before I liked the details. But one thing sat with me longer than the rest: if we were going to build something to track people's spending, it couldn't itself become something they spent on. There's an old, slightly ridiculous truth in that — buy an expensive wallet, and you won't have much left to put inside it. An expense tracker that costs real money is its own punchline. So we decided, early and without much debate, that it would cost nothing. Whatever it needed to run, we'd carry ourselves.
From there, the work split the way good partnerships usually do — without anyone assigning it. Rashid believed in it enough to fund it, trip after trip, decision after decision, long before there was anything to show for it. I came from the technical side, and turned the idea over until it was something you could actually hold in your hand — open it, tap it, trust it. Neither half worked without the other.
We built it for both phones people actually carry, wrote it to work without a single login, and made sure it would run just as well on a mountain with no signal as it would at a kitchen table with perfect wifi. Because that's when the real math happens — mid-trip, mid-laugh, long before anyone thinks to write it down.
When it came time to name it, there wasn't much debate either. The whole idea had only ever been about doing this one thing — together. So we shortened it, the way you shorten anything you plan on saying often: Togé. Together, we share.
That's the whole story, really. Two people who'd rather build something than watch it keep happening to their friends.
Founders, Togé