Philosophy

I don't want your data; I want your money.

This is fairly straightforward. From a business point of view, I want to make my money by rendering (valuable) services in exchange for money from you (our valuable customers).

I do not want to make my money by offering you a free service and then taking your data and making money off of it (one way or another).

There are several reasons why:

• There are enough companies in this world selling data. I personally don't want to be one of them.
• I built uFincs first and foremost as a solution to my own problems. As such, I operate uFincs in such a way that I'd want to buy from them if it wasn't me.
• With all the data regulations going on (GDPR et al), it seems easier (from a business POV) to just make sure I don't handle your personal data.
• With all the hacks and data leaks going on, encrypting everything just seems to make a lot of sense. Both to cover my behind and to make sure yours doesn't get hurt.

You own your data. Period.

I've already explained why I don't want your data. So, logically, that must mean that you get to keep your data. Wow! What a concept!

This principle of "you own your data" has bled to every part of uFincs:

• We encrypt your financial data so that we can't look at it. And if we can't look at it, then we most certainly don't own it.
• We offer the ability to easily export all your data. Get sick of uFincs? Fine, take your data and leave, no problem (well, from your perspective; I'll still be sad about it!).
• We offer the ability to use uFincs without an account. That's right, you can just export all of your data, stop paying for uFincs, and then just use our account-less login option to still manage your finances. We eventually want to extend this idea to fully self-contained desktop/mobile apps, so that you don't even have to rely on us providing a website.

Security is "When, Not If".

In today's world, where hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated, and companies... aren't, I like to treat data security as a game of "when", not "if".

That is, it is a matter of when we get hacked and all our data is stolen, and not if we get hacked.

That's more of a personal philosophy than a business one, but it's a personal one that I apply to this great business of uFincs.

So in building uFincs, I always think "well, when our entire database gets leaked, how bad will that be?" And that's why we make sure to encrypt as much as we can. To make the hackers' job that much harder to do anything with it.

Of course, this principle also led to the decision to make all financial data user-entered: no connecting to bank accounts (via third party service or not), because that would just be another vector for things to go wrong. At least with user-entered data, a malicious actor wouldn't be able to, in the worst case, steal money from you.

Double-Entry Accounting, not Budgeting.

Before I built uFincs, I used GnuCash. Yes, good old double-entry accounting. None of this envelope budgeting or anything; I just recorded my transactions as they happened and made sure I wasn't spending too much.

Obviously, I kept that same process in mind when designing uFincs. I just wanted it better. Cleaner. Smoother. Than GnuCash.

But besides "not connecting to bank accounts", I made one other unchanging decision: no budgets.

There are enough budgeting apps in this world. But there aren't enough (good) double-entry accounting apps... until now!

Lifetime Plans are the Best.

Yes, that's right, I personally prefer paying once for a nice lifetime plan than paying month after month for a recurring subscription.

And that's why I offer a real pricey lifetime plan for uFincs. Because if I were going to purchase it, it'd be under a one-time payment. Sure it costs more upfront, but it means only recording one transaction! :)

Of course, from a business POV, recurring revenue in the form of subscriptions is all the rage these days (for a good reason), so I still need to offer it for uFincs.