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Scouted · November 3, 2026

★ Pick of the dayRedditProductivity
I need a super simple app to track income vs expenses for multiple projects at a time.

track project income vs expenses

Trivially buildable and a real recurring pain, but demand rests on one Reddit post and the space is crowded with spreadsheets and finance apps.

Why now?

The request is concrete and narrow: create a project, log startup expenses, log income, see a running income-vs-expense total and how far you are from recouping the initial investment. That is a weekend-scale CRUD build with no external dependencies, and an autocomplete signal of 24 suggests people actively search for project income/expense tracking terms. However, demand rests on a single Reddit post with no upvote or comment traction, so this is a buildable gap, not a proven market.

The gap

General budgeting and small-business accounting tools (spreadsheets, Wave, QuickBooks Self-Employed) track money by category or by business, not by individual project with a clear 'am I back in the black on this investment yet' number. The poster explicitly wants 'super simple' — the gap is a per-project ledger with a single recoupment figure, stripped of accounting overhead. Note: this gap is inferred from one user's phrasing; no data here shows how many others share it.

Main competitor

Spreadsheets (the default), plus Wave and QuickBooks Self-Employed. All already track income/expenses, so differentiation must come from per-project simplicity and the recoupment view.

Execution plan

  1. Ship a minimal MVP: project creation, expense entries (with a startup-cost flag), income entries, and two headline numbers per project — net total and percent of initial investment recovered.
  2. Validate with the source community first: post the working prototype back to r/AppIdeas and adjacent freelancer subreddits, and ask the original poster to try it, to test whether the single request generalizes.
  3. Keep scope deliberately small — no bank sync, no invoicing, no tax categories in v1 — since the stated pain is complexity and the build advantage is a fast, dependency-free CRUD app.
  4. Add the one differentiating view competitors bury: a per-project recoupment progress indicator, plus a simple export so users can leave without feeling locked in.
  5. Instrument signups and repeat weekly use; if retention is flat, treat the single-post demand as unproven and stop before investing in paid tiers.

Monetization

Low-price one-time or cheap subscription for unlimited projects, free tier capped at 1-2 projects. No willingness-to-pay evidence exists in the signals (no upvotes, comments, or downloads), so treat pricing as an experiment, not a forecast.