Why I built Beyond Payday

I’m Shane Stebner, the founder, and a software developer who has built for the web for most of my career. Beyond Payday is not a startup I raised money for or a side project I hope to flip. It is the tool I wanted and could not find, so I built it, and I use it for my own household every month.

It started with a specific irritation. Every personal-finance app I tried wanted my bank login. In exchange it gave me transactions filed into the wrong categories, a sync that broke every couple of months, and still no answer to the only question I actually cared about — whether the plan works. I did not want a nicer transaction feed. I wanted the math.

You can check my work history on LinkedIn. I would rather you verify that than take my word for it.

Beyond Payday is operated by HTMLGuy LLC, a registered Florida limited liability company doing business as Beyond Payday (formerly PiggySize). It is a real entity with a real address, not a brand name behind a contact form:

There is no venture capital, no outside investor, and no acquirer. Revenue comes from Pro subscriptions and nothing else — no ads, no data sales, no affiliate kickbacks from lenders, and no third-party financial aggregator taking a cut of your information on the way through.

Beyond Payday is not affiliated with Beyond Finance, any debt-settlement company, or any payday lender, and it does not offer loans.

This is the fair question to ask a small product, so here is the direct answer.

Mint did not shut down because it ran out of money. It had Intuit behind it and roughly 20 million users. It shut down because it did not earn enough to justify its place inside a large company. Zeta shut down because Acorns bought it and decided not to keep it. That is the actual failure mode for consumer finance apps: not insolvency, but being switched off the day they stop being strategically interesting to whoever owns them.

Beyond Payday is not exposed to that. There is no board meeting where it has to defend its growth rate, no investor expecting a return, and no acquirer who can shelve it. It costs about as much to run each month as a phone bill, and Pro subscriptions cover that comfortably. It improves as people upgrade, and it keeps running if they don’t.

And a commitment, in writing: if we ever decide to wind Beyond Payday down, you will get at least 90 days’ notice and plenty of time to download an export of the financial records supported by Settings. The one exception is something truly out of our hands, like war, a natural disaster, a critical service provider going under, or a zombie apocalypse. Even then, billing stops on its own and your data stays available to download. You do not have to wait for that to happen to get your data — a JSON export plus CSVs of supported records are downloadable from Settings on every plan, including Free, at any time. Nothing here is held hostage.

This is a passion project in the literal sense — I care about how it is built and how it is run, not only the feature list. Here is what gets the most attention, in order of priority:

None of that is marketing language you have to take on faith. The security page lists every vendor that receives any of your data and sticks to claims you can verify yourself.

I am a developer, not a financial advisor, and Beyond Payday is a planning and tracking tool rather than advice. It does the arithmetic — IRS contribution limits, Social Security at each claiming age, year-by-year projections, Monte Carlo success rates — on numbers you enter. What you do with the result is your call, and for anything consequential it is worth walking into a fee-only advisor’s office already knowing your numbers. That is exactly what it is built for.