We built Envelop because we needed it

My wife and I live in a small town in Louisiana with our four children. Envelop began as the budgeting app we built for ourselves, because after years of trying we could not find one that worked for both of us.

That last part turned out to be the entire problem.

Every app worked for me and not for her

We had tried envelope budgeting before, more than once.

I used a well known envelope app back when you still bought it outright, and again years later once it had become a subscription. I liked it. It handled credit cards in a way that made sense, which is a harder problem than it sounds, and it is the approach I ended up borrowing for Envelop. But over time it felt dated and fussy to move around in, and the yearly price got harder to justify.

The real problem was quieter than any of that. My wife found it confusing. She could not look at the screen and tell what she was supposed to be seeing, and she did not enjoy trying. So she stopped, and I kept going, and the budget became my project instead of our plan.

Next I self hosted a different app on a home server for a couple of years. It handled credit cards in a way I did not care for, but I was willing to live with that since it ran on my own machine. Same ending though. My wife found that one confusing too, so once again I was budgeting alone.

I tried another app and left quickly, because it treated credit cards as something you simply should not use. That is a reasonable philosophy for some people. It was not our life, and I needed to track them honestly rather than pretend they were not there.

I even researched spreadsheets and downloaded one of the popular templates people swear by. It was so confusing to me that I knew immediately my wife would never touch it.

The bank sync detour

Somewhere in there I tried automatic bank syncing, because that is the feature everyone tells you that you want.

It meant re-authenticating constantly just to pull transactions in. When they finally arrived, they landed in the wrong categories. Anything that needed splitting had to be fixed by hand anyway. And the names were useless. A bank statement does not say Chevron Station. It says something like HESTER_STAT00077, which tells you nothing at a glance about your own life.

I was doing the same amount of work, except now I was also cleaning up after a robot. So I shut the sync off and went back to entering everything myself, and the budget got better immediately. Not because typing is charming, but because I was paying attention again.

Then the income stopped

By that point I had mostly given up on budgeting apps.

Then our household suddenly lost an income.

That changes what a budget is for. It stops being a tidy hobby and becomes the thing that tells you whether you are going to be okay. And it very much stops being something one person can do alone in an app the other cannot read. We needed to see what we were working with, organize it, and know we were on the same page. Both of us. On the same day.

So I told my wife I was going to build one

Her response was a fairly sarcastic "yeah, ok."

Fair enough. I understood the skepticism.

But I knew exactly what it had to do, because we had spent years walking into the same walls.

• She had to understand it at a glance, with no tutorial and no explanation from me
• It had to work on her phone, because that is the device she uses the most
• It had to stay in sync, always, so we were never arguing from two different pictures of the same money
• It had to handle credit cards properly and honestly
• The numbers had to be right, because when money is tight, a budget you cannot trust is worse than no budget at all

I started that week.

The first version was a desktop app. It proved the idea and it was a good start, but we abandoned it. A budget that lives on one computer is a budget that one person uses, and I had just spent years learning exactly that lesson.

My wife was the test

She is not a coder, and she has never once asked me for a feature. What she does is tell me how it feels. What is cluttered. What is confusing. What she does not want to look at.

That was the only test that mattered. If she could not use it, it was wrong, no matter how clever it happened to be underneath.

I knew it had worked the day she started using it on her own. Every day, without me asking, checking an envelope before spending money.

That is the whole product in a single sentence. Not that a budget existed. That both of us were finally looking at it.

We have used Envelop for our own money since the very beginning. We still do.

Why it costs money

I did not set out to start a business.

What happened is that we showed it to some of our peers, and they wanted it. They kept asking. And I found I could not simply hand it out, because running it costs real money every month. So it became something you can subscribe to, priced to keep the lights on rather than to make anyone rich.

There is no investment funding here, no growth team, and no roadmap written by someone who does not use the product. There are two people who budget in this app every single day and would go on building it either way.

One more thing about the money, because we have lived the other side of it. Subscriptions creep. The price you agreed to quietly turns into a different price, a little at a time, until one day you are paying a number you would never have said yes to at the start. It happened to us with budgeting apps, and it has happened to us with plenty of other services since. Nobody enjoys that feeling, and we are not going to hand it to you.

What we do not collect

We know the question, because we would ask it too. Should you trust your money to a two person operation in Louisiana?

Here is the honest answer. There is nothing here to take.

Envelop does not connect to your bank. We never ask for your bank login, we do not store account numbers, and we hold no financial credentials of any kind. You name your accounts whatever you want to call them. Checking. Emergency. The Truck. To us they are labels and numbers, nothing more.

The only personal thing we hold is an email address, so that you can log in.

That is not a security feature we bolted on afterward. It is a direct consequence of how we chose to build this. We do not sync with banks, so we have no reason to ever hold the keys to one.

Small town Louisiana

Nobody expects budgeting software to come from here. That is alright with us. We built the thing we needed, in the place we live, for the life we actually have. Four children, real bills, and an income that has not always been steady.

If any of that sounds familiar, you will probably feel at home here.