I’m posting here because I’m hoping to find some folks willing to try it out for a few weeks and give me feedback. My initial iteration yielded positive results, but not the homerun that I was hoping for. So, I started a Kickstarter campaign to help me introduce new features to the service, but the campaign has not been successful.
Here are the tenets of TextSpend:
text messaging is one of (if not THE) best ways to capture/input data. My mobile phone is almost always handy and sending a text takes seconds.
the act of capturing each transaction not only helps me create a virtual log, but it reinforces THINKING about every dollar/cent I spend, which is of value in and of itself.
responses to those sent messages can provide insight that keeps me honest and helps me modify my behavior
data means nothing if I don’t have a goal that I’m aiming for and reconciling against
Appreciate any feedback you are willing to provide or questions you might have. If you’d like to try it out, just PM me and I’ll shoot you the phone number to text, which is all you have to do to get started!
For others who land here, TextSpend seems to no longer be operational. For such long-term tracking, I rarely trust any tools other than general-purpose spreadsheets, that are going to both be maintained in 10 years, AND allow you to export data.
Hey, Dan - this is David Chase, co-founder of TextSpend. You’re absolutely right - trusting data to any entity is always tricky. That’s partly why we chose texting as the format - ultimately, users would have a record of any transaction they sent our way on their mobile phones! And we did have an export feature from day one, as we strongly believe users must retain ultimate control of and access to their data!
Unfortunately we were forced to close the startup as we weren’t able to gain enough users to keep the business afloat. Even a spreadsheet, especially a Google-based one, is trusting someone else with one’s data. But I do believe that Google is a much safer bet than most cloud-based alternatives.
10 years later, it’s kinda kewl to know that at least some one was paying attention to us! Cheers!
Hi David, thank you for checking in here, that’s great to see. As you might imagine I get a bit of joy out of following the different achievements and discoveries of toolmakers who have contributed to the QS community. I think you aren’t David Chase of The Wire but you might be David Chase of Possible. Is that possible?
I might be missing something here because I highly doubt any user has a record of their texting older than their phone. Even purpose-built texting services like WhatsApp or Messenger have trouble storing and fetching truly old messages (I have a 2-year hole in my Messenger conversation with a friend), let alone native texting apps without a centralized message storage server.
Good point. The spreadsheet template I uploaded to Google Sheets is based on my Open Document .ods expense tracking file, which has been functioning offline for over 2 decades, initially via OpenOffice, now through LibreOffice. It can be downloaded from Google Sheets back as an .ods file, so I added a note about that to my post.
Great point on surviving the phone and absolutely correct. Just meant that, from our perspective at the time, it was one of the best and most robust ways for users to maintain data outside of our app. Text messages can be backed up if desired. But yes, typically, as goes the phone so goes the messaging.
Wow, that’s pretty sweet that you based it on open source. Again, we chose text messaging because it seemed more ubiquitous than a spreadsheet and, for the “common” user, more likely they’d use it on a daily basis.