It started at our kitchen table
I did not set out to build a product. I set out to fix something at home.
Our household’s money lived in one person’s head and a couple of bank apps. The chores lived somewhere else entirely, mostly in reminders nobody wanted to hear. Everyone in the house was part of both, but only one of us could actually see either. So I built something for us: a place for the money and the work to sit side by side.
That app is still running. It is the one my family uses every day, connected to our real accounts, with real bills and real chores in it. And it turned out to be the best test bed I could have asked for, because every rough edge got reported the same day.
Why it became Pitch In
The more we used it, the more obvious the gap became. The money apps out there, YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, are excellent, but they are built for the one person who does the books. The kids’ allowance apps, Greenlight, GoHenry, BusyKid, are built around a debit card and treat the child as the whole account. Nobody serves both halves of the same house.
That gap is widest in a household with teenagers in it. They are old enough to do chores that matter and hold money of their own, but not old enough to be shown the mortgage. That is exactly the household I built this for, and I suspected it was not just mine.
So I started turning it into Pitch In.
The money, the bills, and whose turn it is.
The one thing nothing else does
The feature I care most about is simple to say: everyone in the household gets their own sign-in, and you decide what each of them can see.
A parent sees everything: every balance, every transaction, what is due and when. A 15-year-old might see their chores and nothing else, or spending without balances, or a shared account you opened up to them. A withheld account is not shown as zero or blurred out. It simply is not there for them, and it drops out of their totals instead of contributing a guess.
That sounds like a settings page, and in most apps it would be. In Pitch In it is enforced all the way down in the database, so a screen that forgets to ask “who is looking?” does not compile. It is the thing that makes a shared household ledger safe to hand to a teenager, and it is the reason the product exists at all.
Making it SaaS without breaking the family app
The hardest decision early on was structural: I kept two separate codebases. The family app stays single-household, opinionated, and fast-moving. Features get proven there first, with my own family as the first users. Only once a feature has earned its place does it get generalized and ported into Pitch In.
The two repos even have a written working agreement between them, a shared file that spells out that ideas flow one way, from the family app to the product, and never the reverse. It sounds like overkill for a side project. In practice it has kept me honest about what is actually proven versus what I just think is a good idea.
Going from “one family” to “many families” meant rethinking the foundation, not just adding a login screen:
- Tenancy in the database, not in the code. Every household’s data is isolated with Postgres row-level security. The app connects as a restricted database role that cannot bypass it, so a forgotten filter cannot leak one family’s data into another’s.
- Real auth. Email and password, Google sign-in, two-factor with trusted devices, invitations, roles, and ownership transfer. People can belong to more than one household, because separated co-parents and adult kids helping a parent are real customers too.
- An operator console. Access requests, households, activity, announcements, and push notifications, so I can run the thing without living in the database.
- Legal from day one. Terms, a privacy policy, and consent recorded against a specific version, because this is people’s money and their kids.
It is a Next.js and TypeScript monorepo on Vercel, with Postgres on Neon and Better Auth. What is deliberately missing matters just as much: no analytics, no tracking, and no ads. Your household’s numbers stay your household’s.
Designing it like a product, not a project
I am a designer first, so the brand got the same care as the database. Pitch In has its own brand book, a logo generated from parameters so it never drifts between files, and a type system with a monospace for the amounts in lists, so a column of figures reads like an account.
The landing page leads with the problem, being the only one who remembers, and further down it lets you flip the same household between a parent’s view and a teenager’s, because that comparison is the product.
There is also a demo household you can click around in without an account. And it installs to your phone like an app, with notifications for bills due tomorrow and new members joining.
What’s next
Right now chores earn points, and points are not money. The bridge between the two, chores that actually earn an allowance, is the next thing I am building, and it is the whole reason to choose Pitch In over a better budgeting app. Once it lands, a teenager’s view becomes simply “my chores and my allowance.” After that come payments, then bank sync.
Update, October 2026: bank sync came first after all. It shipped as Connected, the paid plan, where your bank or credit union fills in the balances and transactions on its own. Chores that earn an allowance are still next.
One guardrail I have already drawn: Pitch In will be a ledger, not a bank. It will record what a chore earned and that the household settled it, however your household already settles things. It will not hold or move anyone’s money. That line is what keeps this buildable by one person.
Want in?
Pitch In is live at pitchin.house, and since October anyone can sign up. Everything you type in yourself is free. Connected, where your bank does the typing, is $10 a month per household, not per person. There are already real households in it, and my goal is simple: ten families who would be annoyed if it disappeared, before worrying about a thousand.
If you have a house full of people who all pitch in, and especially if some of them are teenagers, I would love for you to be one of them. Create your household, or reach out to me directly. I want to hear what works and what does not.