Twenty years of a spreadsheet. One private app.

For about twenty years, I kept my entire financial life in a spreadsheet.

It started simply — a list of accounts and balances — and grew the way these things do. A tab for budgets. A tab for investments. Formulas for taxes, then projections, then “what if” scenarios for every big decision. Eventually the spreadsheet wasn’t enough, so I wrote a small desktop app on top of it, just for me.

It wasn’t pretty. But it did something no finance app I tried ever did: it showed me, clearly and honestly, where I was and where my choices were taking me. Year after year, that clarity compounded. It’s a big part of why I was able to retire early.

The gapWhy not just use an existing app?

I spent more than two decades working in tech, and I came away with a firm belief: your personal data should belong to you. The more I looked at popular finance apps, the less comfortable I was. Most wanted my bank passwords. Most synced everything to their own servers. Many were free — which usually means the business is built on the data, or on the ads, or on steering you toward financial products.

And when some of the best-known apps shut down or changed hands, people lost years of history overnight. Your financial record shouldn’t depend on someone else’s business model.

“I wanted the clarity of my old spreadsheet, the polish of a modern app, and a guarantee that nobody — including me — could see anyone’s data.”

The buildTurning a spreadsheet into FinTabi

After leaving my career at Apple, I took about a year off to decompress. When I came back to a keyboard, I knew what I wanted to build: the tool that had helped me, rebuilt from scratch for everyone.

FinTabi takes the ideas that worked for two decades — one honest net worth number, budgets based on real spending, side-by-side scenarios, long-range projections — and puts them in a calm, native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Then it adds the part a spreadsheet never had: a Vision Board, because the numbers only matter in service of the life you’re trying to build.

Privacy isn’t a setting in FinTabi; it’s the architecture. There are no servers, no accounts and no analytics. Your data lives on your device and in your own iCloud, and that’s the only place it lives.

The priceWhy $0.99?

FinTabi is built and maintained by one person. I don’t have investors to answer to or a data business to feed, so I can keep it simple: one month free, then $0.99 a month for everything.

The people who most need help getting on top of their finances are often the ones already under pressure. Keeping FinTabi inexpensive — and choosing statement import over costly bank-connection services — is how I keep it within reach.

What’s nextBuilt with the people who use it

FinTabi is just getting started, and there’s a long roadmap ahead — including deeper retirement planning. If there’s something you wish it did, or something that isn’t working the way you expect, write to me at support@fintabiapp.com. I read every message.

Thank you for trusting FinTabi with your financial journey. I hope it helps you get to the day you choose.

— The founder of FinTabi