Years before this studio existed, I watched someone hold their pay stub up to the kitchen light like it might confess under interrogation. A hard worker, paid weekly, fluent in two languages, completely defeated by a piece of paper that was supposedly written for them. What is this deduction. Why is this week smaller. What does YTD mean. The questions were reasonable. The document was not.
I work in HR-adjacent worlds during the day, so I have seen the other side of that paper too. Here is the uncomfortable truth: nothing on a pay stub is secret or even complicated. Gross pay, taxes, a few benefit deductions, net pay. A motivated twelve-year-old could follow the math. What defeats people is that the stub is written in compressed payroll jargon, abbreviated to fit a column, and never once explained to the person it describes. Then we quietly blame workers for not understanding it.
Confusion is not a personal failing, it is a design choice
When sixty million people in this country speak a language other than English at home, an English-only, abbreviation-dense pay stub is a choice someone made, repeated every payday. The same goes for benefits packets that read like insurance contracts and W-4 forms that decide your refund using worksheets nobody finishes. None of this is malicious most of the time. It is just nobody's job to fix, which means it lands on the person with the least power and the least time: the worker, at their kitchen table, after a shift.
So the explanation became software
Plantilla is, at heart, that kitchen-table conversation turned into an app. Take a photo of your pay stub and it explains every line in plain words, in your language, ten of them. It walks you through the W-4 instead of assuming you grew up filling them out. It answers what FMLA actually covers, what overtime you are owed, what to do if your check comes up short. The AI that reads your stub runs on the phone itself, because documents that personal should not take a round trip to a server to be understood.
I named it Plantilla, the Spanish word that can mean a template or a staff roster, because Spanish-speaking workers were the first people I built it for, and the app leads with Spanish to this day.
What I actually want
Honestly, I want the app to be unnecessary. A world of bilingual pay stubs and plain-language benefits packets would delete its reason to exist, and I would celebrate. Until then, the gap between what workers sign and what workers understand is where wage theft and quiet underpayment live. Understanding your own paycheck should not require a favor from a bilingual coworker. Now it requires a photo. It is not the whole fix, but it is the piece I knew how to build.
— JC Mobile App Studio