Built out of frustration.
Kept because it works.

I'm not a developer. I want to be clear about that.

I've spent my career in sales, marketing, and operations. Healthcare, contracting, food distribution, agriculture., contracting, food distribution, and agriculture. I build things when I have a problem I can't solve any other way. Alto is that kind of thing.

For years I managed my money on spreadsheets and gut feel. Then I got serious and tried the apps everyone recommends. YNAB, EveryDollar, Mint. I gave them all a real shot. Months, not days.

None of them fit.

The problem was simple: I get paid weekly, and every one of those apps was built around monthly income. The math never quite lined up. Some months have four paychecks, some have five. Bills fall at different points in the month relative to when money comes in. The apps wanted me to budget my whole monthly income on the 1st. But I didn't have it on the 1st.

I was budgeting money I hadn't earned yet, and the numbers were always slightly wrong in ways I couldn't explain or fix.

So I built a spreadsheet that did. It tracked my pay dates, mapped bills to the pay period they'd actually hit, and showed me a running balance for the week. Ugly, but it worked.

Eventually I turned that spreadsheet into Alto. A real app with bank sync, clean UI, and the same core logic. Budget by pay period. See what's coming in and going out for your specific pay window. Plan with money you actually have.

What changed when I started using it

I haven't overdrafted since. That's the one I'm most proud of, honestly. It happened a couple times a year before. Now it doesn't.

I stopped relying on my credit card to bridge gaps between paychecks. The gaps still exist. My income hasn't changed, but now I can see them coming and move money around in advance.

On lighter pay periods, I actually save. Before, "extra" money just disappeared into the week. Now I can see clearly when a week is lighter than normal, and I know to move something to savings instead of spending it.

The "will I have enough?" stress is mostly gone. That one is harder to quantify but it's real. I open the app, I see the numbers, I know what's coming. That's it.

What Alto is built to do

Alto is for people who get paid on a schedule that isn't monthly: weekly, biweekly, twice a month. People who've been wrestling with budgeting tools that weren't designed for them.

It's not trying to be YNAB. YNAB is great if monthly budgeting works for your life. Alto is for when it doesn't.

We're still in beta. It's a small team (mostly me, with a lot of AI help). There are features I want to add and things that aren't quite right yet. But the core works. I use it every week.

If you try it and have thoughts, I actually read the feedback. This thing exists because I needed it, and it gets better because people tell me what's broken.