One developer, one product, no investors

I am a software developer, and I have been building for the web professionally for most of my career. PiggySize is not a startup I raised money for or a side project I am hoping to flip. It is the thing I wanted to exist and could not find, so I built it, and I use it on my own household’s finances 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.

PiggySize is operated by HTMLGuy LLC, a registered Florida limited liability company doing business as 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.

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.

PiggySize 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 PiggySize ever does wind down, you will get at least 90 days’ notice and a full export of everything you have entered. You do not have to wait for that to happen to get your data — a complete JSON copy plus CSVs 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 the craft of it, not only the feature list. Three things get disproportionate attention:

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 PiggySize is a planning and tracking tool rather than advice. It does the arithmetic — IRS contribution limits, Social Security at each claiming age, month-by-month 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. A fair number of members use it for exactly that.