I’ve had 13,000 sign-ups. Ten percent used The Birdy for longer than a week. Last month, I introduced “freemium,” so users can pay $4.95 a month for extra features, like setting budgets and tracking income. A few dozen have signed up so far.

Besides getting more paying members, I hope to sell anonymized data for targeted marketing, advertising, coupons, or partnering with other companies. Companies like Starbucks are interested in people who mention buying there often––that X number of people in a metro area spend Y amount daily on their coffee.

—Corey Maass started a service called The Birdy that emails you each day to ask you what you spent (people always be trying to help us figure out what we are spending, JESUS LAY OFF). ANYWAY, the service  might work for you if other things like spreadsheets and Mint have not, so you should read this interview in FastCo for that reason if you’re interested in this kind of thing, but also: Maass explains his plans for monetization of his startup and that is SUPER INTERESTING.