Family Budgets

Family Budgets, later rebranded to Share for YNAB, was a product I built on top of the YNAB API.

For anyone who hasn’t used it, YNAB stands for You Need A Budget. It’s a budgeting app with a loyal following and, at the time, a pretty obvious gap: budget sharing wasn’t properly supported.

The idea was simple enough: let someone connect their YNAB account, invite another user, and choose exactly which budget categories that person could see or use. So instead of sharing the whole budget, you could give someone access to just the bits that mattered to them, like Eating Out or Car Maintenance, while keeping the rest private.

Why it stands out

• It started from a real user problem, not a vague “this might be cool” idea.
• It placed 2nd in the 2018 YNAB API contest, which was a nice sign I wasn’t the only one who thought it was useful.
• I took it from idea to working product, then ran it alone as a small SaaS for several years.
• It made modest income, enough to pay for itself, but more importantly it proved I could build, ship, support, and operate a real product end to end.

That contest result mattered more than the prize itself. It was early proof that the product solved a real problem for other people, not just a niche annoyance I happened to have.

What I built

• YNAB OAuth login and account linking
• user invitations and access management
• granular category-level permissions within a shared budget
• the application, hosting, and day-to-day running of the service as a solo developer

Outcome

The product ran from 2018 until December 2022. I shut it down when YNAB launched YNAB Together, which added native budget sharing.

In practical terms, that meant the product had done its job. It solved a real need before the platform itself caught up, and it gave me hands-on experience taking something from concept to launch to long-term operation. For a first proper product, that’ll do nicely.