Launching Balance Open
Building a wallet for all the world’s currencies together
We are really excited to release Balance Open, a free, open source Mac app for your money. We are launching with support for Coinbase but our master plan is to support every single currency — digital and traditional.
📦 Download the latest release here
Clone the repository: github.com/balancemymoney/balance-open
What is Balance, the app?
Today, Balance is a simple personal finance tool for your Mac’s menubar. It is available in the U.S. Mac App Store. We make it easy to connect to and monitor your traditional financial accounts using and API from Plaid.
Plaid has relationships with thousands of financial institutions and handles lots of regulatory and security issues around accessing customers’ financial data. Balance is a powerful, simple UI built atop their API.
We launched Balance in February and Apple featured it on the front page of the Mac App Store for a few weeks. We have a few hundred customers and, most importantly, a 5-star rating.
If you would like to check out Balance, you can download it here. Subscriptions start at $4.99 a month for links to 5 financial institutions.
What is Balance Open?
Today, Balance Open is a free menubar app for checking Coinbase. We are working on support for GDAX, Poloniex and BTCC. We plan to integrate with every crypto-currency exchange out there. We will also be integrating with several new tokens that are hoping to have their Initial Coin Offerings in the coming months.
We are writing integrations for each of the exchanges directly to the app. As part of the authentication flow, we have a closed-source server to manage the API keys. We want to open source that in the near future.
What about iOS?
We will be open sourcing our iOS app very soon. We are hoping to launch with iOS 11 in the Fall. We want to take advantage of the incredible improvements to iOS for iPad as well as the new iPhone hardware.
If you are interested in joining the beta for this app, you can join our mailing here. Of course, if you’re comfortable in Xcode, you’ll be able to clone the project and build it on your machine.
Who is working on this?
There are a few people working on Balance Open right now:
Partners — Full time
Christian Baroni — Designed interfaces for Microsoft & Stripe
Ben Baron—Developed on Photos for Mac at Apple
Richard Burton — Mocked up early concepts for Ethereum
Freelancers—Part time
Sam Beckett — Designs interfaces and videos for Twist
Raimon Lapuente — Developed software for SkyScanner
Emma Renals—Worked with Morgan Stanley, UBS & Credite Suisse
Advisors—Some time
Chris Downer — Designs Sketch using Sketch
Sam Duke — Develops software at DeepMind Health
Charlie Ellington — Built up Soulshine Yoga
We are really excited to announce some new team mates in the coming months. They are finishing up at their current work places at the moment.
Who is helping this?
Balance Open would not exist today if it wasn’t for the help and support of some really amazing people. We’d like to publicly thank these people for agreeing to help:
Brian Lovin—Co-founder of Spec and Spectrum
Conrad Irwin — Developed Rapportive and Superhuman
Kevin Greene — Developed Bitcoin Swift and YouTube iOS
Ryan Jones—Shipped Weather Line for iPhone
Rachel Paul — Coaches business people at ConsultEast
Dylan Enright—Director of Fundraising at Wefunder
Myke Hurley — Co-Founder of Relay FM
Federico Viticci— Editor of MacStories
Chris Wright — Lawyer for the people
Who is funding this?
We have self-funded the company for 18 months and recently decided to take on outside capital.
Angels
Father Ted — Doctor for the people
Tim O’Shea — Investor and entrepreneur
Josh Buckley — Creator of Mino Monsters
If you are interested in partnering with us as an investor, please email me: richard@balancemy.money
How can I contribute?
We need lots of help to build Balance Open. Here are some of the areas where you might be able to contribute:
Development: github.com/balancemymoney/bal-open
Design: spectrum.chat/balancemymoney
Testing: bit.ly/balancemailinglist
What could Balance become?
A wallet for all the world’s currencies will be really useful. We think that’s first step towards something a lot bigger. Millions of blockchains will be launched in the next few years. Something is going to link them all together into an Interchain. When that happens, we want Balance to become the most popular Interchain Browser.
We have lots of work to do. If you would like to contribute, please join us: github.com/balancemymoney
