Budgeting for lumpy freelance income

The idea

YNAB is proof that people pay $14.99/mo for budgeting discipline — and also the loudest source of freelancer complaints, because its envelope model assumes a paycheck shows up on a schedule. Freelancers live feast-or-famine: a $12k month, then two $2k months, with 25-35% of every deposit secretly belonging to the IRS. YNAB’s answer is workarounds and forum threads; the underlying product simply wasn’t shaped for them.

The wedge is a single opinionated mechanic instead of a flexible system: compute a sustainable monthly salary from trailing income, hold everything else in a buffer, and skim tax off every deposit before the user can feel rich. Add quarterly estimates with the numbers already filled in and you have the product freelancers keep trying to assemble out of three savings accounts and a spreadsheet. Why now: Plaid makes deposit detection trivial and LLM categorization removes the tedious income-vs-transfer tagging that killed earlier attempts.

Who pays

Full-time freelancers and solo contractors in the US — designers, developers, writers, consultants — who have felt a scary tax bill at least once. $9/mo, deliberately under YNAB. Distribution: r/freelance and r/personalfinance, freelancer newsletters, and SEO on searches like YNAB for freelancers, which is an existing complaint with volume.

MVP scope

• Plaid connection with AI income-vs-transfer classification
• Computed monthly salary from trailing 6-month median with worst-month floor
• Per-deposit tax set-aside percentage and a visible tax vault balance
• Quarterly estimate drafts with amounts and deadline reminders
• Simple envelope budgeting on the fixed salary number
• Skip for v1: automatic money movement, invoicing, S-corp payroll math, couples/shared budgets, mobile apps

Build Steady, a budgeting app for variable-income freelancers built around one mechanic: pay yourself a computed monthly salary from a buffer. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Plaid for bank connections, Postgres, Claude API for transaction categorization and estimate explanations.

Core flow: 1) User connects checking accounts via Plaid and marks which account is the income landing zone. 2) The app identifies income deposits (Claude classifies transactions as client income vs transfers/refunds) and computes a recommended monthly salary: trailing 6-month median income minus tax set-aside, floored to survive the worst recent month. 3) Every deposit is auto-split on arrival: X% earmarked to tax (default from a simple federal + state + self-employment estimate based on the user's state and filing status), the rest to the buffer. 4) On the 1st, the app tells the user to transfer their salary amount from buffer to spending; everything downstream is simple envelope budgeting on that fixed number. 5) Quarterly, it drafts the estimated tax payment with the amount filled in and links to EFTPS, with a reminder 5 days before each IRS deadline.

Pages: onboarding wizard, dashboard (buffer months of runway, this month's salary, tax vault balance), transactions with income tagging, quarterly taxes, settings. Non-obvious details: never move money automatically — instruct transfers and confirm from Plaid data; recompute the salary suggestion only quarterly so it feels stable. Pricing: $9/mo or $90/yr, 34-day free trial matching YNAB's.