Why we're building a money app you'd pay for.

I.

The first money app I trusted was Mint. It was clean. It was free. It connected to every bank I had. I built the habit of opening it every morning and watching the dashboard refresh, and for a few years, I felt like I was actually getting good at money.

Then Mint got bought by Intuit. Then Intuit started inserting credit-card “recommendations” into the sidebar. Then they shut it down. The five years of transaction history I'd built up over there ended up in my email as a CSV — the legal minimum — and I had to figure out what to do with it.

II.

When I went looking for a replacement, I learned something uncomfortable. Most of the popular “free” finance apps aren't free. They're free to you. They monetize your spending data — selling it to data brokers, lenders, and advertisers who will pay handsomely to know that you bought plywood at Home Depot last weekend.

The paid alternatives were better. YNAB charges $14.99 a month and treats you like a customer. Empower charges nothing and uses their app as a funnel into their wealth-management business. Monarch is in the middle. None of them gave me budgeting and net worth tracking and investments and the ability to walk away with my data intact.

III.

I started this project as a spreadsheet. Then a Notion page. Then a half-built side project. The goal was simple: a personal finance app that worked the way I wanted, that I could trust with the most intimate data I have outside of medical records, and that would still be there in five years.

Every decision since then has been about staying small enough to keep that promise. One subscription. One plan. No advertisers. No data resale. No free tier funded by the next iteration of Mint.

IV.

The privacy thing isn't a marketing position. It's an architectural decision. Arden works without a bank login — every feature, end-to-end, from CSV import to envelope budgeting to net worth tracking to investment holdings. Plaid is on the roadmap as an option. It will never be a gate.

The export thing isn't marketing either. Full CSV and JSON export is in Settings, today. If you cancel, your data exports before your access ends, not after. If you come back six months from now, your data is waiting.

V.

I'm not pretending Arden will be the right tool for everyone. If you want a free app and you're comfortable with the trade, Empower works. If you want a slick polished enterprise product with a sales team and a roadmap committee, Monarch works. Arden is for the person who looked at those two and felt like neither one was theirs.

VI.

The pitch is short. $12 a month. One plan. Everything included. Built by someone who got tired of picking between privacy and polish.

The harder part of the pitch — the part this essay exists for — is the trust. I'm asking you to put your money data into a product built by one person, on the promise that I won't do to you what every previous app did to me. That's a real ask. I take it seriously. Hold me to it.