As a software developer, I have a strict personal rule: never reinvent the wheel.

If a problem exists, chances are someone else has already written the code to solve it. So, earlier this year, when my wife, Momo, and I realized our household finances were getting messy, I figured it would take five minutes on the app store to fix it.

We were struggling with the classic budgeting black hole. We knew money was coming in, but tracking exactly where it was going, how much was left for the month, and actually adjusting our habits based on real data felt nearly impossible.

Momo had been using a basic budget tracker app. It did an okay job of logging what we spent and showing what was remaining, but it wasn't enough. It was great at recording the past. It did nothing to help us plan the future.

We needed something better. We needed to be able to see our budget together, on our own phones, in real-time. So, following my rule, we went on a hunt for the perfect app.

It was a disaster.

The apps we found generally fell into three frustrating categories:

The Ad-Farms: Some free apps were okay, but they were so completely bloated with advertisements that it actually slowed down the process of logging a simple coffee purchase. Budgeting is already tedious; an app shouldn't actively make it harder.
The Solo Players: We found apps with great categorization and beautiful charts, but they lacked the one thing we actually needed: shared household access. They were designed for one person, not a couple managing a life together.
The Paywalls: The few apps that did offer shared syncing and advanced features locked them behind expensive, mandatory monthly subscriptions.

After weeks of downloading, testing, and deleting apps, I realized something annoying. The wheel wasn't just broken - for couples like us, it barely existed.

So, I broke my own rule. I concluded that if we wanted an ad-free, shared, truly useful household budget tracker, I was going to have to code it myself.

I took it on as a weekend hobby project. My goal was simple: build a clean dashboard where Momo and I could instantly see our monthly income, our spending categories, and exactly how much we had left to safely spend that day.

What started as a hobby quickly turned into an obsession. As we started using the earliest, clunkiest version of the app, we found it incredibly easy to manage our expenses together.

But the real magic happened at the end of the month. Momo and I would sit down at the kitchen table with a pen and paper. We’d look at the data in the app I just built - seeing exactly where we overspent or underspent - and use that to manually plan out our budget for the next month.

It was incredibly effective, but doing it by hand was tedious. So that became the next thing to build. Why not just build a monthly planner directly into the app?

We started iterating fast. We added features we needed, and ruthlessly deleted features that looked cool but ultimately overwhelmed us.

It took 5 months of constant tweaking, bug fixing, and real-world testing in our own household to get it right.

And once we did, it worked so flawlessly for us that we realized it was selfish to keep it on my hard drive. There have to be other couples out there frustrated by the exact same things we were.

That is how SpendSage was born.

We’ve published the Android app and web version. It isn't built by a massive corporation trying to mine your data; it’s built by a husband and wife who just wanted a better way to manage their money together.

We are incredibly excited to share it with you, and we are even more excited to hear your feedback.