Wants vs. Needs Budgeting App
Categorize spending into wants versus needs and show where discretionary spending affects investing and saving.
Sorts spending into what was necessary and what was chosen, then shows what the chosen half is costing in the long run. The point is not guilt but arithmetic: this much discretionary spending is this much not invested.
What a v1 does5 features
- Every transaction sorted into need, want or saving
- The user's own definitions, learned rather than imposed
- Discretionary spending shown as what it would have compounded to
- Month-on-month movement in the ratio
- One want per month chosen deliberately rather than by default
The market
Monarch has roughly 1.8M monthly users and YNAB about 1.4M, at $99.99 and $109 a year. Mint's closure left the largest gap in consumer finance and three paid products grew into it. This is costed at $7 a month.
Where these numbers come from
| Company | Earns | Reach | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rocket Money | $880M+ saved for members | 10M+ members | Company-stated, 2025 |
| Monarch Money | $99.99–199 a year | ~1.8M monthly active users | Published pricing, 2026 |
| YNAB | $109 a year | ~1.4M monthly active users | Published pricing, 2026 |
Why this audience
These viewers have adopted the framing that discretionary spending is investing forgone - the content states it directly. They already sort purchases that way in their heads. Showing what the wants column would have compounded to is their own argument, quantified.
Before it can launch
- Open-banking access through Plaid
What it earns
Drag me Every figure recalculates as you go.
0.005% of 20M followers · capped at 50,000
Opens on the price this idea was costed at, $7.
1,000 paying — 0.005% of 20M followers — × $7 a month = $7,000 a month
Fifty thousand paying users is the ceiling every one of these pages is drawn against, not a forecast. It opens at a thousand, the bottom of the range, so the first figures you see are the modest ones. What the cap buys is comparability: the same range on every app, and the percentage of the audience it takes as the number that moves.
Is this the one for your audience?
We fund it, build it, and run it. You bring the audience and take a share of the revenue. Nothing to pay and nothing to build.
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