A no-budgeting money app that took #1 Product of the Day twice

The challenge

What we did

1. 1Find the number the product is actually about

   Cashews had a premise before it had an interface, and no settled answer to what a person should see first. We ran the alternatives as wireframes and clickable prototypes rather than arguing them out. Different ways of expressing what is safe to spend. Different amounts of the underlying calculation made visible. Different weight given to the day, the week, and the month. Several of those were coherent on their own terms. Only one held up once people used it. That round of exploration is why the app opens on a single figure instead of a dashboard, and it is the decision every screen after it depends on.

2. 2Design the app around it, at roughly one hundred screens

   The single figure is the easy part to draw. The screens go on everything that has to agree with it. Accounts connect and disconnect. Recurring expenses get predicted, then confirmed or corrected. Goals take money out of the spendable figure before the person ever sees it. Transactions arrive from thousands of US banks with inconsistent names and have to be sorted without turning the person into the sorter. We designed the UX and UI across the mobile app, roughly one hundred screens, for iOS and Android. The rule throughout was that no screen could contradict the number on the first one. The moment one does, the product is asking to be checked rather than trusted.

3. 3Build the site that has to argue against budgeting

   A no-budgeting app has a harder marketing page than a budgeting app, because the reader arrives with the wrong mental model and has to be talked out of it before anything else lands. We designed the website and built it in Webflow, so the team could keep rewriting that argument themselves as they learned which version of it worked. That mattered here more than usual. The product went to Product Hunt twice, in June 2022 and again in July 2023, and the site is what that audience lands on both times. It is still running on the design and the Webflow build we shipped, checked in August 2026.

4. 4Stay on it: new features, and onboarding rebuilt

   The engagement did not stop at the first launch. Cashews kept shipping through 2023 and 2024, and we kept designing inside it: UX and UI for new features, and a reworked onboarding. Onboarding is where this product is most exposed. Someone has to connect a real bank account before the app can show them anything at all, and what they get back is a number they have not learned to read yet. That work carried the app into its second Product Hunt launch in July 2023, which took first place for the day the same way the first one had.