HoneyGiRead, the project I restarted three times

It all started with a frustration I shared with Poissonlabo, my best friend, who draws and publishes his own work. The amateur manga platforms we saw in France ran ads without paying the authors a thing. No passion in the product, just profit. We decided to build the place we wished we had found, one where everyone wins, the authors, the readers, and us.

I restarted it three times. Not out of hesitation, but to start on solid ground. The current version was framed before it was coded, with a written spec, screen mockups and twenty-three diagrams versioned in the infrastructure repository, four of which are published on the project page.

The product's bet fits in one sentence. A reader who plays, collects and supports sticks around longer, and what they spend ends up with the author they read. Nine mini-games, a card gacha sold in expansions, a drawing Battle, and on the other side a monthly subscription to an author, tips and a share of ad revenue, with a real bank transfer at the end.

The economy has two currencies and three red lines. HoneyCoins are bought, HoneyDrops can only be earned. Drops are never sold, Coins are never converted into Drops, and a player can never withdraw cash. Drops pay for boosters, trades and Battle stakes. Every movement writes a line in a ledger, and an end-to-end audit found three real-money bugs, fixed since, with mandatory tests on those paths.

Technically, it's four surfaces and three repositories. An Expo and React Native app with 168 screens, a NestJS API with 446 routes on MongoDB Atlas, a Vite and React website that serves the replica, the back-office and an OBS overlay for streamers, and a Terraform infrastructure on AWS. A single Apple extension carries the Apple Watch app, the Live Activities and the author widget.

I found and closed ten flaws before launch, including a paywall enforced only in the app, a payment webhook without a secret and a hard-coded Apple review account credited with 5,000 coins. 248 test files, behavioural rather than snapshots, some of which read the source code to lock a decision in.

The app launched first on the New Zealand App Store, on 2 September 2026, a deliberately contained release to get the ad network validated before France. The beta is open in France through TestFlight, Android is waiting for its keys, and the next job is translating the works in the catalogue so the app is genuinely usable outside French.