PayCheck Budget

Origin

October 2025: a financial reset, a baby on the way, and a family tightening up around its money. The first app answered a question every household quietly asks together — how much do we have left, and what's safe to spend? Not a fintech aggregator, not a spreadsheet replacement — a protective layer between intent and overdraft, designed for the way working families actually get paid.

What it does

• Can I Afford This?

  The headline feature. Refuses to greenlight a purchase that would leave the family with $0 for the rest of the pay period — even if the math says yes. Daily-minimum safety buffer + percentage buffer, whichever is larger. Five response tiers from 'cannot afford' to 'very comfortable.'

• Multi-cadence paycheck model

  First-class support for weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, and monthly pay cadences. Bills auto-assigned to the right pay period based on actual configured pay dates — not hardcoded calendar splits. Started semi-monthly (the founder's own cadence); expanded to all four in the April 2026 update so every working-family cadence fits.

• Siri voice expense logging

  App Intents-based: “Hey Siri, log an expense in PayCheck Budget.” Saves directly to App Group storage, auto-refreshes the app on foreground so entries appear instantly.

• watchOS + 5 complication styles

  Liquid Glass-styled budget glance, paycheck split, upcoming bills. Color-coded green/yellow/orange/red by buffer health. Quick expense entry from the wrist.

• CloudKit family sharing

  Spouses see the same numbers in real time without a BudgetCo cloud account. Multi-profile manager for households running parallel budgets.

• OCR budget import

  Take a screenshot of an existing budget spreadsheet. The Vision framework extracts bills and amounts automatically, with a preview screen before importing.

• 25-screen financial literacy hub

  A second product hidden inside the app: foundations, debt + credit, income + investing, big purchases, badges, quizzes. Includes a Bankruptcy Guide written from lived experience.

Engineering

• The Affordability Safety Buffer (the family-protection thesis, in code)

  The original affordability check was just arithmetic: available − cost ≥ 0. The fix introduced a two-pronged buffer — daily minimum ($20/day × days-to-payday) and percentage buffer (15% of remaining budget) — using whichever is larger. Five new response tiers replaced the binary yes/no. The UI surfaces the buffer explicitly so the user can see why a 'yes' might still be a bad idea. This is the project's thesis encoded as a feature: protect the family from the math saying yes.

• The Siri data-flow root cause

  Symptom: Siri said 'logged to Paycheck 1' but the expense never appeared in the app. Two orthogonal bugs masquerading as one — ExpensesStore only loaded data once at startup, and LogExpenseIntent used hardcoded paycheck cutoffs that didn't match the user's actual configured pay dates. Fix landed a foreground-reload notification observer plus a dynamic paycheck assignment that reads the user's pay dates. Centralized key constants in SharedUserDefaultsKeys to prevent string-typo drift across iOS / Widget / Watch / Siri.

• Live App Store crash recovery

  Feb 22, 2026: 'Fix critical crashes reported in App Store.' The app was already live with paying users when the crashes surfaced. Same-week follow-ups shipped a household-income summary, duplicate-bill dedup, forecast improvements, and a widget/UserDefaults key alignment fix.

Stack

• Swift
• SwiftUI
• SwiftData
• CloudKit
• App Intents (Siri)
• Vision (OCR)
• watchOS
• Widget Extension
• StoreKit 2