Frederick Smith

Not a great look for a founder two weeks out from a launch, but here it is.

I'm building a personal finance app. I built it because every finance app I tried turned into a second job I never applied for. The design goal was: one insight, Monday morning, then please leave me alone. Numbers, not guilt.

Which means when it's working, I don't open it. The Monday card shows up, I go "huh, $61 on delivery again," I close it. Twice a month I actually poke around inside.

Every retention playbook says that's a problem. DAU is a metric I've decided not to care about, and I've spent a few uncomfortable weeks sitting with that instead of quietly designing streaks and badges to fix it.

I quit four budgeting apps in three years. Same pattern every time strong for two weeks, then a pile of uncategorised transactions I never wanted to open again.

I'm building Spendalyst around that failure, and I'd like to know whether it's just me before I launch on August 12th.

If you've abandoned a money app YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, a spreadsheet, whatever I'm curious. What actually made you stop: the maintenance, the guilt, or did it just stop telling you anything useful? What did you go back to afterwards? And has anything about money ever stuck for you long-term?

I'll read every reply. If something in here changes my mind about what this should be, I'd rather find that out now than after launch day.

Building in public and doing some research on my own scar tissue. I've rage-quit more finance apps than I can count YNAB three separate times, two spreadsheets I lovingly built and abandoned by week three, one app whose notifications made me feel like a parent was scolding me.

Every time it was the same story: the tool slowly turned into a chore, and one day I just... stopped opening it.

So I want the war stories. What money app or system did you rage-quit? Was it the manual data entry, the guilt-trip notifications, the endless categories to maintain or something else?

What made you finally walk away?