Eleuterio
By Daniel Farré Manzorro ·
In 2018, a finance director at a last-mile logistics platform came to me with a problem.
The platform was already processing millions every week across three countries. But client billing —statements, invoices, all of it— was still manual. Spreadsheets, macros, PDFs sent one by one. Days of work every week. Errors that meant starting over from scratch.
She asked me to automate it.
I built it on a Raspberry Pi.
I initially proposed hosting it within the company's tech team.
That didn't happen.
So it ran from home instead.
We called it Eleuterio.
The billing logic was not simple. Different document types per market, custom pricing, driver settlement reconciliation, legal constraints that meant the same document couldn't be called the same thing in every country.
Eleuterio handled all of it.
The British team pronounced the name with absolute seriousness in every meeting. That never got old.
For six years, it processed thousands of documents every week.
UK alone reached £3M a week in billing volume.
With no manual labour —just a spreadsheet upload.
Every week.
Without exception.
There were occasional network hiccups from the homemade setup.
But once the CI/CD pipeline was stable, changes could be deployed safely —after passing an end-to-end test suite covering every use case.
The core logic held.
Over years, it adapted to new requirements, edge cases, and workflows —without breaking the process.
For most of that time, I didn't think of it as a product.
I charged for development hours.
That was it.
That's not a maintenance story.
That's a design story.
Eleuterio wasn't really a billing tool.
It made one messy operational reality executable.
It turned something fragile and manual into something the business could rely on —every week, without thinking about it.
No spreadsheet choreography.
No "who knows how this works?"
That is what coherence looks like in production.
Systems don't degrade because code rots.
They degrade because context disappears —people leave, decisions lose their meaning, and behavior stops being predictable.
Eleuterio held for six years because it was built to match one real process.
The lesson wasn't about invoicing.
It was about structure: when the model is right, the system holds.
That's Ficus.