What a Failed Calculator App Taught Daniel Haiem

Walk into almost any American high school math class and you will find the same machine on every desk: a Texas Instruments graphing calculator, priced somewhere around $100 to $150, running on technology that has barely changed since the first George Bush was in office. The best-selling TI-84 still has a small monochrome screen, a processor slower than a cheap smartwatch, and a habit of eating AAA batteries. 

Nearly every other piece of consumer electronics has gotten dramatically faster and cheaper over the same stretch. The graphing calculator simply hasn’t, and it hasn’t needed to. Texas Instruments controls an estimated 80 percent of a market worth more than $300 million, not because the hardware is good, but because exam boards and classrooms made it mandatory decades ago and the habit calcified.

Daniel Haiem spent a few years inside that system before he decided to push back against it.

Before he ran a software company, Haiem stood at the front of a classroom. He taught AP Physics in Los Angeles, and he kept watching the same quiet inequity play out. Students who couldn’t comfortably spend $150 fell a step behind the ones who could, all for a device that did a fraction of what the phone already in their pocket could do. 

The standard defense from teachers and testing bodies was reasonable on its face: phones can cheat, calculators can’t. To Haiem, that wasn’t a law of nature. It was a software problem nobody had bothered to solve.

So he solved it. ClassCalc launched in 2018 as a free smartphone app with the functionality of a graphing and scientific calculator, plus the feature that mattered most: a lockdown mode that sealed off texting, browsing, and social apps during a test. That single capability dismantled the only real argument for dedicated hardware. 

By late 2018, the app had roughly 1,000 active users and a waitlist of around 10,000 students across districts looking to bring it into their classrooms. “Graphing calculators came out in 1985 and they have barely changed since then,” Haiem said at the time, framing the gap as decades of innovation the device had simply never absorbed.

The technical part turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was everything around it.

Districts approve new classroom technology slowly, and usually only when teachers ask for it first. And teachers had little reason to ask. Many had spent fifteen or twenty years building lesson plans around TI hardware, supported the whole way by the company’s conferences, training programs, and dedicated help lines. 

Economists have a clean term for this: switching costs, the accumulated friction that keeps people attached to a product long after cheaper or better options arrive. A free app, however good, doesn’t dissolve thirty years of institutional muscle memory. Haiem was not really competing against a calculator. He was competing against an ecosystem designed, deliberately, to make leaving expensive.

He was far from the only one to learn that lesson. Casio, HP, and the sleek open-source upstart NumWorks have all built capable alternatives; the free web tool Desmos graphs anything a TI-84 can and runs on any browser. None of them displaced TI in the classroom. The brand teachers already knew kept winning by default. Only recently has the ground shifted at all, with the College Board beginning to allow a built-in Desmos calculator on the SAT and some AP exams, the first real crack in a foundation that had held for two decades.

ClassCalc, for its part, kept going. In 2022 it was integrated into SmarterProctoring’s online exam platform, a partnership the two companies announced as a way to give remote test-takers a consistent, monitored on-screen calculator. But the deeper takeaway for Haiem wasn’t about calculators at all. It was a conviction that has shaped everything he has built since: the bottleneck in good software is almost never the code. It’s the judgment, the communication, and the follow-through wrapped around it, the parts that don’t show up in a feature list.

That conviction became AppMakers USA, the Los Angeles software development firm Haiem founded in 2014. The company builds mobile, web, and custom software, with a stated emphasis on cross-platform development, one shared codebase running across iOS, Android, and the web. 

It says it works without outside funding and keeps its engineering in the United States rather than handing core architecture offshore, a pitch aimed squarely at founders who have been burned by the cheap-and-distant model before. According to the company, its project history ranges from an app built for NFL running back Austin Ekeler to enterprise work for brands including CVS and Los Angeles Apparel.

What makes Haiem an unusually honest narrator is that he has nothing left to sell on the calculator front. He can explain why ClassCalc didn’t topple TI without a pitch attached, and his explanation is refreshingly unsentimental: the idea wasn’t wrong, the market was simply defended by policy and habit rather than performance, and those markets don’t fall to a better mousetrap. They fall, if at all, slowly, and from the outside.

His second act is that lesson applied in reverse. AppMakers doesn’t try to dethrone incumbents. It builds the software other companies need and can’t build themselves, competing on the unglamorous thing Haiem says he found missing the first time around: doing the boring work well, shipping on time, and talking to clients like adults. For a founder who once swung at a $300 million monopoly, it is a quieter ambition. It may also be the more durable one.

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