Hi Product Hunt 👋

I'm Heinrich — I built Keep Above on my own, from New Zealand, around a full-time job, since 2022.

I grew up without much money, and knowing how to manage it wasn't something anyone around me had — not because anyone failed at it, but because there was never enough of it to learn on. Later, every budgeting app I tried wanted feeding: every coffee logged, every category kept tidy. Miss a week and the picture's wrong, and you're never going back to fix it.

What changed it for me was sinking funds. Almost nothing that wrecks a pay cycle is actually a surprise — the car registration, the insurance, the annual renewal. Put a bit away each pay for each of them and they stop being emergencies.

Keep Above is that idea with as little upkeep as I could get it down to: you enter your bills once, keep one number current — your balance — and it works out what's genuinely spare between now and the next one. There's no spending history in it, so everything on screen points forward. It doesn't connect to a bank either — less a privacy stance than a reach one, since bank feeds only exist in a handful of countries and typing it in works anywhere.

If you want to see how it thinks without installing anything, the link above goes to the free calculators on the website — a few dozen of them: repair or replace, rent or buy, new or used, own or hire, what an appliance costs to run. Same arithmetic that runs inside the app, no sign-up, nothing saved, nothing you type leaves the page. The app itself is on Android and iOS, free tier included.

Two things I'd like. If you try the app or the calculators and a number looks wrong, tell me — I'd rather hear it here than not hear it. And I'd genuinely like to know what you'd want a forward-only budget to show you that this one doesn't.

It's a planning and projection tool — an educational aid, not financial advice.

Keep Above

Budgeting that looks forward — no spending history

Budgeting that looks forward — no spending history