If you’ve spent any time in the UAE, you’ll know karak. Sweet, spiced, milky tea, sold for pocket change at pretty much every cafeteria and tea stall in the country. It’s cheap and it’s everywhere. Which makes it the perfect joke currency.
So I built a silly little thing: the Karak Calculator. Type in any amount in dirhams, and it tells you how many cups of karak that’s worth. That’s it. That’s the app.
How does it work?
I’ve set a cup of karak at 1.5 AED, which is about what you’d pay at most tea stalls. The app divides your amount by that, and rounds down to full cups. (No half cups. We’re not animals.)
Some of my favourites:
- A Starbucks coffee (15 AED) = 10 cups of karak
- A monthly gym membership (300 AED) = 200 cups
- A Dubai Metro day pass (20 AED) = 13 cups
The emoji got a bit out of hand
Put in a big number, like your salary, and the app shows every single cup as a floating tea emoji. Each one is a slightly different colour, drifting around on its own timing. It’s weirdly relaxing to scroll through. Until you remember that’s your salary.
My first version tried to draw 10,000 of them at once and crashed the browser. So now it only draws the cups you can actually see on screen as you scroll.
Try a million dirhams. That’s over 650,000 cups. The app even warns you first: “Pro tip: This might take a while… grab a real karak while you scroll! ☕”
The little details
It uses the new official UAE Dirham symbol, which I made as a custom SVG. A joke currency converter should still get the real currency right!
There’s also a fun facts pop-up. Apparently the average person here drinks three to four cups a day, which works out to about 1,923 AED of karak a year. That’s a lot of tea.
What’s it built with?
It was a weekend project, and a good excuse to try out Next.js 15 and the new App Router. It’s built with:
- Next.js 15
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS 4
- shadcn/ui
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting
It took about three or four hours from start to live, and it’s free to run. Most of that time went on getting the emoji to float nicely.
Give it a go
Try it out at karak-calculator.pages.dev. The code is on GitHub if you want a poke around.
If you find a good one, tweet me @hashir with your best karak conversion!