Financial clarity. Your data stays yours.

I used Mint for years. Then I had to find something else.

When Mint shut down I tried going back to a spreadsheet. It was clunky enough that I gave up on it after a few weeks. The obvious move was one of the other tools (Empower, YNAB, Monarch), but every one of them wanted me to connect my actual accounts to their servers, and most wanted a monthly subscription on top of that. After enough headlines about companies leaking customer data, paying every month to hand my numbers over to a new vendor wasn't a tradeoff I wanted to make for a tool I was only going to open once a week.

What I wanted sat in between. A spreadsheet I controlled, with manual entry kept honest, plus the few things that don't need to be manual (live crypto prices today, maybe stock tickers later if users ask for them). And on top of that, a real dashboard. Insights laid out cleanly, plain-English feedback on how I was doing, a few best-practice nudges, and the data-entry UX of an actual product instead of the tab-and-click dance of a spreadsheet.

At some point the thought turned into: why not build it myself? So I did.

It's mainly a tool for me. I haven't advertised it, posted about it, or pitched it. A few friends know it exists. If it grows into something more, that's good. The architecture doesn't need it to.

Your data stays in your Drive.

The privacy model came first; the product was built around it. Grounded uses Google OAuth with the drive.file scope, the most restrictive Drive permission available. That means Grounded can only read and write files it created itself. Nothing else in the user's Drive is visible to it. Ever.

On first sign-in, Grounded creates one private Google Sheet inside the user's own Drive: Accounts, History, Events, Meta. Every snapshot, every value, every change lives there. There's no Grounded database. No user table. No "we have your data" waiting to be breached. If a customer ever wanted to leave, they'd open Drive, see the file, and decide what to do with it. It's already theirs.

Track everything in one place. Without giving anything up.

The product itself is straightforward. Five account types. A net worth headline with a chart underneath. Time filters. A milestone system that nudges you from your first tracked dollar to a million. And one small AI moment each week. On desktop the dashboard splits two columns, assets on the left and debt on the right, then collapses to a single column under 900px.

usegrounded.app

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I designed every screen. Claude wrote the code.

The honest version: I'm a designer. I can read code, I can edit a stylesheet, but I'm not a software engineer. Grounded exists because Claude is good enough now that a designer with a clear brief can ship a real product solo. The work split looked like this:

• I designed every screen, copy line, and interaction. Brand, typography, layout, the milestone vocabulary, the privacy framing. That's the designer side of the job, and it didn't change.
• I wrote the requirements like a brief. "Here's what the user sees when they sign in. Here's what the Google Sheet needs to look like. Here's the milestone trigger logic." Specific enough to implement, loose enough to let the implementation breathe.
• Claude implemented. The OAuth handshake, the Sheets API calls, the chart rendering, the worker that proxies the Claude API call without exposing my key. I reviewed everything, ran it, broke it, asked questions, refined.

The build is intentionally simple. One static HTML file, a tiny worker for the AI proxy, and a CDN-friendly stack of vanilla JavaScript and CSS. No build step. No framework. Easy to read, easy to host for free.

What Grounded taught me.