About
Built by one person. On purpose.
Arden is a personal-finance app written by Tyler — a working military networking and cybersecurity engineer who got tired of finance apps that sell your data, freemium funnels that gate the good stuff behind ad targeting, and bank-sync defaults that fail at 3 a.m. No investors. No growth team. No advertisers. One person, one product.
The short version
Why does a cyber engineer build a finance app?
Mint shut down. Personal Capital became Empower and started funneling everyone toward a 0.89% advisory fee. Monarch lifted their price 25% in a year. Copilot moved to an iOS-only model with a 7-day trial that requires a card up front. Every mainstream option got worse, not better.
Meanwhile, the pattern under all of them was the same: bank login required, transaction data flowing through a pipe that breaks monthly, business model that depends on selling either your attention or your data. Spreadsheets give you back control — but at the cost of hours of manual entry.
I spent four years rewriting the same envelope-budgeting + net-worth + investment-tracking workflow across three different spreadsheets. Each one was better than the apps, and each one was a maintenance burden I didn't want. Arden is the version where the spreadsheet's control and the app's convenience finally meet.
What it means
One person doesn't mean amateur.
It means a small set of structural decisions that compound — and a few honest tradeoffs.
No investors
No quarterly growth pressure
Arden is self-funded. There's no board demanding 3× year-over-year, no exit timeline driving roadmap decisions, no investor with a return profile that needs me to monetize attention. If a feature is right for users, it ships. If it isn't, it doesn't.
No advertisers
No data resale, period
Subscription pricing means the people using the product are the customers. Not the product. Mint sold data to lenders. Empower funnels users into advisory upsell. Arden does one thing: charge $5 or $12 a month, and refuse the easy money.
Cyber background
Security as a first-class concern
Day job: network and cybersecurity engineering, with an active TS/SCI clearance. That perspective shapes how Arden handles secrets, payment data, and the Plaid connection — see the public security page for the actual posture, not marketing claims.
In public
You can read the work
Every meaningful product decision goes through the blog, the journal, or the changelog. If you want to know why Arden made a choice, you can read the reasoning. If you want to know what shipped this week, the changelog runs weekly.
Honest tradeoffs
Things one person can't do (yet)
No 24/7 phone support. No mobile app on Android yet (iOS is in TestFlight). No household / multi-user features. No automated dispute resolution for charged-off accounts. The roadmap is real; the queue is finite.
Independent operating
Built on small, durable infrastructure
Postgres on Neon. Hosting on Vercel. Transactional email through Resend. Optional bank sync via Plaid. Every piece is replaceable; nothing is exotic; the whole stack would survive me getting hit by a bus better than most VC-backed products would.
Get in touch
Email goes to a person. Replies usually come within a day.
Press, partnerships, general questions
New press inquiries, partnership pitches, anything that isn't support or security. I read these myself; expect a real reply, not a canned one.
hello@ardenmoney.com
Existing-user support
Account issues, billing questions, anything that's broken in the product. Routes to the same inbox as transactional email.
support@ardenmoney.com
Security disclosure
Found a vulnerability? Email this address directly. See /security for the responsible-disclosure policy.
security@ardenmoney.com
Newsletter
Stay in the loop.
Occasional updates: new posts, shipped features, occasional notes from Tyler. Two or three emails a month at most.
Want to see it? Try Plus free for 30 days.
No credit card required. Cancel any time. Privacy plan at $5/mo if bank sync isn't for you. Full export forever on either plan, no lock-in.