I Cancelled 5 Apps and Built My Own Wealth Tracker in an Afternoon

I filed a tax extension back in April. It's late June now, and I'm still behind getting everything to my CPA. A dozen K-1s, a stack of entities, all of it sitting in a pile that I kept not dealing with.

So last week I finally sat down to deal with it. And instead of doing the sane thing, I cancelled the app I was about to buy and built my own (I know how that sounds).

I want to walk through what I actually built, why I think this is a real shift and not just me being stubborn, and the honest catch that should stop most people from copying me.

What I was paying for

Here's the stack I had been running, or was about to:

• QuickBooks: financial statements
• Kubera: net worth
• YNAB: budgeting
• A spreadsheet: my retirement and property models
• Vyzer: the K-1s (I was one click from subscribing)

5 tools. None of them talking to each other. None of them shaped like my actual financial life.

My financial life is a dozen entities, syndications throwing off K-1s, direct real estate, the operating business. Every one of those apps wanted me to mash that into the shape it was built for, then I'd export, reconcile, and stitch the pieces together by hand anyway.

That stitching was the actual job. The subscriptions just moved the mess around.

What I built in an afternoon

One app. A dozen entities living in one place, and I can slice them any way I want.

• A CPA-ready P&L and balance sheet I can hand over without a week of cleanup
• Net worth, pulled from the same data instead of a separate tool
• Spending trends, the part YNAB was doing
• The K-1 mess finally consolidated, the thing I was about to pay Vyzer for
• All of it filterable by entity, by category, by whatever question I'm actually asking that day

My data, my categories, my rules. When my CPA asks where a number came from, I can trace it instead of shrugging at a dashboard somebody else designed.

I have zero python skills. I wrote this the way I write everything now, in English, talking to the model until the thing on screen matched the thing in my head. The skill is knowing exactly what you want the system to do, which is the part the subscriptions never let me decide.

The shift I think is coming

For 20 years the answer to any problem was "there's an app for that," and you rented it. That made sense. Building software took a team and a year, so you paid a monthly fee to use someone else's compromise.

It's starting to become "I'll build the app for that," and you own it.

The interesting part is that custom software was always possible if you had engineers. What changed is the cost of building the narrow, weird, exactly-shaped-for-you version just collapsed. The economics that made renting obvious are tilting the other way.

The honest catch

Here's the part that should give you pause, because it's a real one. The moment you build it, you own it.

The maintenance. The accuracy. The audit trail when your CPA asks where a number came from. That cost didn't disappear when I cancelled 5 subscriptions. It moved from a monthly fee to my own time and discipline.

A subscription is also a promise that someone else keeps the lights on, patches the bugs, and stands behind the numbers. Build your own and you're the one on the hook. For financial data, where a wrong number is an IRS problem and not a typo, that's not nothing.

So I'd think hard before telling anyone to do this. It's right for people with the time and the temperament to keep their own system honest. If that's not you, keep your subscriptions. There's no shame in renting.

I happen to be in the small group that enjoys this sort of thing. I suspect that group is about to get a lot bigger.

So the question I keep chewing on: in a few years, do most people still rent their software, or build it? And which are you?