Why We Built Groat
We didn't set out to build a personal finance app.
We set out to stop being the kind of household that misses a broadband renewal and ends up paying nearly double for the next 12 months.
The Spreadsheet Era
For years we managed our household finances on a spreadsheet. Mortgage, energy, broadband, council tax, subscriptions — all of it, manually tracked in rows and columns we'd update every few months when we remembered.
It worked. Sort of.
The problem with spreadsheets is that they're passive. They don't remind you. They don't flag that your broadband contract is expiring in 3 weeks. They just sit there, quietly out of date, while life gets in the way.
The Moment That Changed Everything
One month we noticed our broadband bill had jumped from £22 to £40.
We hadn't switched provider. We hadn't upgraded. We'd just missed the renewal window — gone past the end of our contract without realising — and quietly rolled onto the out-of-contract rate.
Eighteen extra pounds a month. £216 a year. Gone. Not because the price went up, but because we weren't paying attention.
And it wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Energy tariff, car insurance, a software subscription we'd forgotten about. The pattern was the same every time: we knew the renewal was coming eventually, we just never had a clear view of when.
That broadband bill was the moment we stopped accepting it as normal.
Why We Couldn't Find What We Needed
We looked around for something that would fix this properly.
The big budgeting apps felt like overkill — built for people who want to obsess over every transaction, connect every bank account, and track spending down to the last coffee. That's not what we needed. We needed something calm. Something that just showed us what was coming up and made sure nothing slipped through the cracks.
The simple bill trackers went too far the other way — just a list with no context, no budgeting, no bigger picture.
We wanted one place that held everything together. Bills and renewals, yes — but also a sense of where money actually sits, what savings are building towards, and what the household net worth looks like over time.
Nothing we found did all of that without feeling overwhelming.
So we built it ourselves.
Building Groat
We built Groat over a few months — evenings and weekends, driven by the same frustration we were trying to solve.
It started as a contract and renewal tracker. Just the thing we immediately needed. But as we built it, the edges kept expanding naturally — if we're tracking bills, we should be able to budget against them. If we're budgeting, we want to see our accounts. If we can see our accounts, we want to know our net worth.
The result is Groat — a household finance dashboard that tries to hold all of that in one calm interface without making you feel like you need a finance degree to use it.
Here's what it covers today:
- Bills & subscriptions — every recurring cost, with renewal alerts so nothing catches you off guard
- Accounts overview — a manual snapshot of where money sits (no open banking, intentionally — you stay in control)
- Zero-sum budget — pulls directly from your bills so you're not entering things twice
- Savings goals — track what you're building towards
- Net worth — a simple running picture of where you stand
- Vault — for the stuff that always sneaks up on you: passport expiry, warranties, software licences
- Weekly digest — a short email every Sunday showing what's coming up that week
The Jobs We Wanted Groat To Do
We weren't trying to build a generic money app. We were trying to solve a few very specific household problems:
- Stop missed renewals before they quietly become expensive defaults
- See every bill in one place without digging through statements
- Build a budget around real household commitments instead of rough guesses
- Keep upcoming admin visible without maintaining another spreadsheet perfectly
Those are the same problems behind our guides on [how to stop missing contract renewals in the UK](/blog/how-to-stop-missing-contract-renewals-uk), [how to track household bills in the UK](/blog/how-to-track-household-bills-uk), and [how to build a zero-sum budget in the UK](/blog/how-to-build-a-zero-sum-budget-uk).
Who It's For
Groat is for people who want to stay on top of their household finances without it becoming a second job.
If you've ever missed a renewal and paid more than you should have. If you've ever opened a spreadsheet, stared at it, and closed it again. If you just want one calm place that tells you what's coming up and whether you're on track — Groat is built for you.
It's free while we're in beta. No open banking required. No complicated setup.
If that sounds useful, start with the free household calculators](/calculators) or go straight into the product at [heygroat.co.uk. We'd genuinely love you to try it and tell us honestly what's missing.
— Team Groat