We built the tool
we couldn't find anywhere else.

January 1st, 2024. Intuit shut down Mint.

Like millions of people, we'd relied on Mint for years. Not because it was perfect — it wasn't — but because it did the fundamentals well enough. You could see your cash flow, track your spending, and catch the subscriptions that had quietly been eating your budget for months. It was the single place you went to know where you stood financially.

When it closed, we started looking for a replacement. We really tried.

YNAB is great if you want to deeply rethink how you budget. We didn't. We wanted to see where our money had been going, not build an elaborate envelope system. Copilot had beautiful design but limited analytics and no web app. Personal Capital cared about investments more than day-to-day spending. Monarch Money was probably the closest — genuinely good product — but it lacked the subscription intelligence, anomaly detection, and reimbursement tracking that had become essential for our lives.

After six weeks of app-hopping, we sat down and made a list of everything we actually needed:

• →A clear income vs. expenses view, by month, clickable
• →Automatic subscription detection — not manual entry, actual detection
• →Alerts when something looks financially weird
• →A way to track work expenses and generate reimbursement reports
• →Something that stays out of the way the other 27 days of the month

Nothing did all of this. So in March 2024, we started building SkyLight.

The first version was embarrassingly simple — a Next.js app that read a Simplifi CSV export and drew a bar chart. But even that single chart, showing income stacked against expenses month by month, was more useful than anything else we'd tried. It answered the question we actually cared about: "Am I making more than I'm spending?"

From there, features accreted naturally. We added subscription detection after noticing we were paying for three services we'd forgotten about — and building the algorithm to detect them automatically was genuinely fun. We added anomaly alerts after a forgotten free trial turned into an unexpected $249 charge. We added reimbursement tracking because we travel constantly for work and the process of compiling expense reports was genuinely painful.

Every feature in SkyLight exists because we needed it ourselves. That's still true today.

We're a small team. We move fast, we fix bugs quickly, and we add features because we need them — not because a product manager decided it was the quarter for it. If you have an idea, reach out. There's a good chance it's already on our list. And if it's not, that probably just means we haven't been burned by the problem yet.

We built SkyLight for ourselves. We're sharing it because we think you deserve better too.

— The SkyLight Team