Gain
Where your money stands.
Six numbers once a month, and one plain sentence about which way you're going. A quiet money record for iPhone that does the arithmetic and leaves the deciding to you.
iPhone · No bank connections · No account · Free to download
Runway
Worked out from the six numbers below
- Net worth
- $40,600
- What you keep
- 40%
- Enough, at 4% a year
- $975,000
Your cash would cover 5 months like a normal one. Net worth, as written: $40,600.
Worked out on this page as you type, with the same arithmetic as the app. Nothing is sent or kept. Enough is a rule of thumb: twenty-five years of a normal month.
Six numbers, once a month.
Cash and savings. Investments. Home and other assets. Debts, as one total. What a normal month costs, your own estimate. What comes in, if you want to say.
That is the whole of a month. Nothing is imported and nothing is guessed, so every figure is one you wrote. A correction is saved as a new record and the earlier one is kept, so the history never quietly changes.
Net gain since August: $3,400.
Your savings went up and your investments went up. 5 months of runway, up from 4.4 in August.
What Gain says at the end of a month: what moved, in plain words. Down is said as down. Nothing is graded.
Arithmetic, never advice.
Gain works out what follows from your own numbers and says it is arithmetic. What to do about it is never its call.
"If a normal month cost $200 less, runway would be 5.3 months" is a calculation. "Spend less" is advice. Gain only ever says the first.
- No score, no grade, no streak, and nothing marked as behind.
- No comparison with anyone but your own earlier months.
- No bank connections. Gain never sees an account, only the figures you write.
- The tools answer one question each, from your own six numbers, as often as you like.
- Where an idea comes from a book, the book is named, so you can weigh it yourself.
Try something, with an end date.
Knowing where you stand is half of it. Gain also keeps what you are trying, so the next month's numbers have something to be read against.
- Cook five nights a weekAn experiment. It runs for as long as you set, then it ends.Day 13 of 30
- Lease the car, or buy the used oneA decision. Write what you expect, and it comes back on the day you pick.Comes back Sep 15
- A standing deskSomething you want. Put it down, and look again after a wait you choose.Look again Sep 18
Each of these is yours to start, change or drop. Gain does not count what you have not done.
The everyday side, when you want it.
Around the six numbers sit rooms for the rest of a money life, every one of them typed in by you. Use one, use several, or never open them.
- Transactions
- Subscriptions
- Lent and borrowed
- Gift cards
- Receipts
- Prices
- Gifts
- Journal
- Story
With Gain Premium, four more: Earning, Papers, People, and Split bills.
Scan a letter or a receipt and it becomes a document on the phone. Speak a note and it becomes words, on the phone. Then read the months back together in your Story, or as a Yearbook.
On your iPhone, or in your own iCloud.
Your record lives on the phone you write it on. Turn on Sync with iCloud and it also lives in your own private iCloud, on your other devices. Gain sends your record to no server of ours, and we cannot see a single figure.
Your record should outlive any app, including this one. An archive, a spreadsheet, and a readable copy, made on the phone whenever you want them, free. Gain's privacy policy is in the app, in Settings.
- Bank connections
- None. Gain never asks for a login and never reads an account.
- Sign-in
- None. There is nothing to create and nothing to hand over.
- Analytics and ads
- None.
- Scans and voice
- A scanned page is kept as a document with its location taken out. Speech is turned into words on the phone, and no recording is kept.
- Purchases
- Through Apple. Gain checks with the App Store whether Premium is yours and never sees your card.
- Your data
- Archive, spreadsheet, or a readable copy, any time, free. Delete everything in Settings removes the record on this iPhone; a copy in iCloud is managed in Apple's iCloud settings.
Free to keep. Premium, if you want more.
Everything you need to write a month and watch it move is free: the six numbers, the sentence, every tool, every room but four, iCloud sync and every way out. Gain Premium is optional.
Gain
Free
Now, Worth, Try, Paths, every tool run live, transactions, subscriptions, lent and borrowed, gift cards, receipts, prices, gifts, the journal and your Story. Sync with iCloud. The "Where you stand" widget. Every export.
Gain Premium · optional
- Earning, Papers, People and Split bills
- Keeping what a tool says, with its figures
- A readable copy kept fresh in iCloud Drive
- The rest of the widgets
- More than one reminder on one habit or experiment
Monthly, yearly, or once.
Gain Premium is bought through Apple, and the App Store shows its prices in your own currency in the app. The monthly and yearly plans renew until you cancel them in your Apple Account settings; buying once never renews. If a plan ends, nothing you wrote is locked away: the paid rooms stay readable, and the last copy in iCloud Drive stays where it is.
Gain is an independent app from the people who make HourLife. It is not one of the mini apps and it shares nothing with them: no purchase, no account, no data.
Calm about money, on purpose.
Gain is for adults keeping an honest record of their own money. It is a record and a calculator, not financial advice, and it will never tell you off for a month you did not write.
Version 1.0 · Coming to the App Store
Gain holds your money. HourLife holds the rest of your life.
Plans, goals, habits, and a journal for everything that is not a number, in a private Life OS that syncs through your own iCloud account.