Why We're Building PennyWatch
Every personal finance app solves the wrong problem. Here's what we think is actually broken — and what we're trying to do about it.
We've both tried every personal finance app. Mint. YNAB. Copilot. Monarch. A spreadsheet phase that lasted three weeks before being quietly abandoned. We kept coming back to the same feeling after using all of them: this is more work than it's worth.
That's a strange outcome for software that's supposed to reduce your mental load around money.
The real problem isn't tracking
Most finance apps start from the same premise: if you can see where your money went, you'll make better decisions about where it goes next.
This is directionally true. But it misses something. The gap between "I can see I spent £340 on food last month" and "I will spend less on food next month" is not filled by more data. It's filled by understanding your relationship with each category of spending — which purchases you regret, which ones you'd make again without hesitation, and which ones you made on autopilot without thinking at all.
YNAB calls this "giving every dollar a job." It's a good framing. But the execution buries you in budget maintenance. The job of the software becomes the thing you're doing, rather than understanding your money.
The emotional signal is the data
Here's what we think is actually useful: knowing how you felt about a purchase, not just what it cost.
A £90 dinner that was the best meal you've had in years is a different financial fact than a £90 dinner you barely remember. Both show up identically in a transaction list. Neither is "bad spending" — but one of them you'd repeat and one of them you wouldn't.
PennyWatch's core mechanic is simple. When you log a purchase, you tag it with one of four emotions:
- Worth it — you'd do it again
- Necessary — you didn't choose it, but it had to happen
- Neutral — fine, no strong feeling either way
- Regret — you wish you hadn't
That's it. No budget categories to maintain, no complex rules. Over time, PennyWatch builds a picture of where your regret actually lives — and that picture is far more actionable than a pie chart of spending categories.
What "no dark patterns" actually means
We also wanted to be honest about the business model before we build it, not after.
Most finance apps are free because you're the product. Mint was eventually shut down; the real value was the user data sold to financial product advertisers. "Free" tools that know your income, spending, and debt levels have obvious commercial incentives that aren't aligned with you.
PennyWatch will be paid. A single price, clearly stated. No upsells, no "premium insights" paywalled behind a higher tier, no advertising. We'd rather have fewer users who trust us than more users we're quietly monetising.
We're not announcing pricing yet because we want to validate the product first. But we're committing to the model now, before anyone has paid us anything, because we think that matters.
Where we are right now
PennyWatch is in active development. We have a working prototype. We do not have a public app yet.
We're building the iOS app first, because the emotional tagging mechanic is most natural as a quick mobile interaction — the kind of thing you do immediately after a purchase, while you still remember how you felt about it.
If you want to be first to try it when we open access, sign up here. One email when it's ready. Nothing else.
This is the first in what we're calling the Codernate devlog — honest, specific updates about what we're building and why. No content marketing, no SEO padding. Just the real story.