How Expensify is Building Bridges with OSS and React Native

Abraham describes Expensify as a tool for helping people collaborate, with financial transactions as one form of that work. The company shifted toward a chat-based product to support communication across use cases, from expense reporting to events and charity. He says the product vision also shapes Expensify’s one-team internal structure.

Expensify’s older mobile app was a custom framework dating to 2009, while its web and mobile products had become separate. With about 30 to 40 engineers, the company chose to expand its engineering capacity by engaging independent developers. Abraham says more than 1,600 developers have contributed code to the new repository.

Independent testers report bugs in Slack, where QA partners check that reports are reproducible, clear, and not duplicates before adding them to GitHub. An internal Bug Zero assignee evaluates each issue, and front-end bugs can be posted automatically on Upwork with a $500 base rate. After a fix is tested, merged, and in production for seven days, the reporter receives $50 and the fixer $500.

As proposal reviews became a bottleneck, Expensify created the Contributor Plus role for experienced community members to triage proposals and conduct initial reviews and testing. Abraham says the program has about 30 members. For specialized work, Expensify also works with expert teams at Callstack, Margelo, Software Mansion, and Infinite Red.

Expensify encourages shared ownership of its dependencies and collaboration between contributors; Callstack and Software Mansion, for example, worked together on a TypeScript migration. The company brought top contributors to Curaçao for ExpensifyCon and opened a public coworking space in San Francisco. Abraham describes these efforts as part of a broader aim to help people collaborate and pursue shared goals.