Alex Stone

Okay, so now that I’ve plastered news throughout the web about Spenderbot being released, I figured I would take a moment to post something personal about all of this.

As some know, Spenderbot was an idea I had a while ago. I’ve been using financial apps on my iPhone pretty much since I got my first iPhone 3G and I’ve been through over a dozen apps, ranging from free to $9.99.

At the end of the day, none of these apps were perfect. At least not for what I wanted out of a financial app. So it started as an idea that I never really had time to work on.

Then… I lost my job.

Suddenly, time was the only resource I had and, with the advice from my dad, I put it to use and got started on Spenderbot.

Originally, Spenderbot was going to be this huge, massively complex app. The original idea was to have it offer you all kinds of personal analytics data and constantly remind you when you were about to spend money and break your budget. It was going to have all these complex charts and graphs and all kinds of bells and whistles.

I removed a lot of those features over time, because I found that even I didn’t care for those features. They were getting in the way of what should be a simple tool for everyone to use to better manage their money.

I’ve worked very hard on Spenderbot and will continue to work even harder, cranking out new features and tweaking the UI and fixing bugs to make the app really amazing. Right now, I’d say it’s just somewhere between good and how-did-I-manage-money-before-this.

It’ll get amazing, I promise.

I have a few features rolling out in the next feature update (1.1, not 1.0.1 which is just bug and UI fixes) that are going to be great for people that share accounts and for people that move money around a lot.

I am also focused on changing the way locations are handled. I didn’t want to completely rip off Gowalla/Foursquare, but it’s seeming more and more like that will end up being the best solution.