CountAbout: How the Affordable Cloud-Based Personal Financial Management Platform Makes Budgeting Convenient

Published

badcredit.org March 26, 2019

Imagine it’s 2012, and you’re out shopping for a new desk chair for your home office. When you start to think about what kind of chair you can afford, you realize that all of your detailed financial information is stored on a desktop computer at home.
You call your significant other to ask if there’s enough money in the budget for the purchase, but he or she is at work and doesn’t have access to the information, either. Do you go home, check your financial software, then come back if you have sufficient funds? Or do you buy the chair without knowing if it fits into your budget?
That was the problem encountered by Joseph Carpenter, Co-Founder of CountAbout, and his wife when outfitting her office. And that experience inspired him to start thinking about a more convenient, cloud-based financial management system.
“I discussed it with my neighbor, Alex Wong, a computer developer who became my co-founder. We initially asked, ‘Can we make an app that would work with someone’s Quicken account?” Carpenter said. “By that point, I had thoroughly vetted all the solutions out there and realized there was absolutely nothing similar. As people who are gluttons for punishment, we decided the next best thing was to build our own.”
CountAbout launched in 2012 with two goals. The first was to bootstrap itself through subscriptions, not by relying on investors whose interests could compromise CountAbout’s mission of service and quality. The second objective was to maintain a focus on user privacy and to subsist solely on subscription revenue rather than selling user information to other companies.

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