Who makes this

Debito is made by one person. I racked up over $50,000 on credit cards, and I am still working my way out of it.

I know what you are thinking: how do you put $50,000 on credit cards? I am too embarrassed to publish the itemised version. The short answer is that I lived outside my means, which is not an exotic story. Average person, average life, and about three years of dealing with it, in the sense of dealing with it by not opening anything.

When I did open it, I tracked it in a spreadsheet, then in a Canva workbook I had made look nice enough to tolerate. I hated both. The arithmetic was fine. The problem was that every time I wanted to know one thing, I had to maintain the whole apparatus first, and maintaining it was the part I did not have in me on a bad month.

The tools I could find were not built for the position I was actually in. They wanted the full picture before showing me anything: every APR, every minimum, every statement date, at a point where opening the statements was the hard part. And the free ones were free because somebody was paying to put a loan in front of me at the moment I felt worst about it.

So this is the thing I wanted to use: type in one balance, get a real date, and find out where you stand before anybody asks you for anything. Quick to open, and deliberately not a wall of information. Being thorough is easy. Being worth opening on a Tuesday evening is the hard part.

Paying off debt is a normal part of my life now, and that is what I would most like to make true for other people. Not a crisis to be survived. A thing you are doing, that is going fine, that you can look at without bracing.

What that changes

Being in the same position as the people using it is not a credential. It does not make the maths better. What it does is make certain decisions obvious that are apparently not obvious from the outside.

No ads, and no lead generation. Debito will never take money to show you a consolidation loan, a balance transfer, or a debt settlement company. That is the entire business model of most free debt tools and it is why they are free. This one costs money to run and is paid for by people who choose to upgrade.

Nothing here is designed to make you feel worse. No streak that punishes you for a hard month, no red numbers, no notifications engineered around guilt. There is a written rule about this that the app is built against, and it is published in full. Not a summary of it. The actual document. Read it and hold me to it.

The honest answer wins, including when it is unhelpful. Sometimes the right move is to slow down, keep a buffer, or leave the debt alone for a few months. The writing says so, and so does the app.

What Extra will pay for

Extra is not finished, and nothing is behind a paywall today. Every account has everything. Charging for something I have not built yet is the one move this product cannot make and still mean what it says on its own front page, so until it exists, there is nothing to buy.

It is called Extra rather than Pro on purpose. Pro says “for professionals”, and nobody here is doing a job — they are getting out of debt. What it adds is exactly what the name says: a little extra, on top of a product that has to work completely without it. If the free version ever feels like a demo, I have got this wrong.

Debito costs real money to run, and it is worth being specific about what. Connecting a bank is a per-account fee to Plaid. The assistant spends tokens every time it answers. Hosting, the database, error tracking and email all bill monthly whether anybody upgrades or not.

Extra will cover that, and then pay for the next thing to get built. There is no other revenue and there is not going to be. No ads, no lead generation, nobody buying a slot in front of you. Which means the arrangement is unusually plain: you would be funding the platform you are using. Not a growth target, not an acquisition. The thing you have open.

Native apps are coming. Apple and Google both charge to put an app in their stores, and both take ongoing work to keep it there. Extra is what will pay those fees and that work.

And further out, a reward programme: something from us at Debito to mark somebody lowering what they owe. Right now absolutely nothing rewards you for it. I am not going to describe it in detail yet, because I would rather say it when it exists than promise it now.

What I would like from you

I would rather hear that something is wrong than not hear it. If a number looks incorrect, if a screen made you feel judged, if the thing you needed was not there. That is the most useful message I can get, and it goes straight to me rather than to a support queue.

Tell me. I read all of it.

One more thing

If you are in this too: the position you are in is extremely common and almost nobody talks about it, which is exactly what makes it feel like a personal failure rather than an ordinary situation with a way out of it.

It is an ordinary situation with a way out of it. Slower than anybody wants. But the arithmetic is on your side once you can see it, and seeing it is the part this is trying to help with.