Garden Studio

Garden Studio is a one-person software shop. The name comes from a period of garden leave between jobs — time I used to find out what I'd do if money wasn't an object. The answer was building stuff like this app.

I've spent most of my career in corporate finance, working with large corporate budgets and with complex financial information systems. The professional tools for that scale are serious. The consumer tools I had for my own money weren't. I started keeping my personal budget in an Excel spreadsheet about ten years ago, and it slowly became a zombie — hard to update, impossible to hand off to others, but still the best option I had.

What frustrated me most about other consumer budgeting apps wasn't the interface. It was the accounting. Venmo transfers — a group dinner where four people pay you back the same night — completely breaking your spend totals. A big expense like a car downpayment being unable to spread across months. A transfer between accounts rendering that month indecipherable. Every consumer app I tried either ignored these cases or handled them badly. And the features I needed existed somewhere — just never in the same tool.

I've also watched a lot of people around me struggle with their finances, not for lack of trying but for lack of a tool that takes them seriously. Workbench is the app I needed. I think it might be the one they need too.