Why we stopped building a money tracker

Before PocketMoney there was Pocket, a personal finance app in Bengali. You opened it, typed in what you spent, and it showed you a monthly ledger and a budget. Real people in Bangladesh used it to manage their money, and we learned more from them than from anything we had planned.

Two things became hard to ignore. This post is about both of them and how they turned into the product we are building now.

Nobody wants to log money by hand

People would start strong, enter every rickshaw fare for a week, and then stop. That is not a willpower problem. Typing in every purchase is tedious, and most people have better things to do. In the US, banks and apps already track spending automatically, so logging was never going to be the product.

Money is mostly a group project

The second lesson took longer to see. When people talked to us about money, they were rarely talking about their own spending. They were talking about someone else. A roommate who is late on rent. A partner who spends differently. A sibling who needs help every month and does not like to ask.

Almost every money tool is built for one person looking at a dashboard. When two people are involved, the tools make you pick between two bad options. Share everything, and it can feel like being watched. Keep everything separate, and you cannot coordinate without awkward conversations.

So we started over with a different question. What would it look like to handle the shared parts of money together, while the private parts stay private?

Why you text it

PocketMoney is an AI you text. There is no dashboard to learn. You tell it you paid $84 for groceries and want to split it with Maya, and it records the split and lets Maya know. You ask whether you can afford a $220 pair of boots before you buy them, not after.

Texting matters because it reaches people at the moment a decision happens. Nobody opens a budgeting app while standing in a store. People do open their messages.

Where we are now

We are early. We are onboarding our first couples and roommates by hand, and the product changes almost every week based on what they tell us. This blog is where we will write about what we are building and what we get wrong along the way.