Comment by philip1209

I have an internal app for my company (https://workshop.contraption.co). It's a Rails app, with basic Devise login. I can add people to the system, and scope which of the systems they have access to.

I put everything that's not business critical in it. Some examples:

* A "Scoreboard" growth chart of my MRR. It syncs with Stripe's API periodically. I add some friends and peers to it so they can see my progress. When I hit pre-programmed MRR milestones, it triggers a celebration announcement.

* An RSS->Sendy tool. My company blog is hosted in Jekyll and has an RSS feed. I send email newsletters for the blog through a Sendy installation. Sendy doesn't have good email templates, so this little system applies a template to RSS feed items and creates a draft in Sendy so I can send it.

* A mini internal CRM / search engine, which an intern was helping me manage for a bit.

* Some cron jobs that send email reminders to me, such as sending electricity bills to my accountant for a home office reimbursement.

I highly recommend companies have a full-featured "toy" app separate from customer data. Customer apps have a lot of red tape to protect data and uptime. But, we underestimate how long it takes to set up an environment or pick a stack when we have ideas - even for things like "cron job that sends emails" - so a small app stack helps encourage creativity and useful little scripts with minimal effort.