Reads in about eight minutes. Everything here is optional to read before you start — the app explains itself as you go — but it's here if you want the whole picture first.
Start a snapshot and enter what you have — checking, savings, investments, real estate, vehicles — and what you owe: credit cards, loans, a mortgage if you have one. Rough numbers are fine. You can correct anything later, and nothing here connects to a bank to verify it for you; you're the source of truth.
That first entry becomes Snapshot №1. There's nothing to compare it to yet — the second one is where the notebook starts telling you something.
Once a month, open the app, update the same numbers, and save. That's the whole habit. Ten minutes, roughly — accounts, debts, what came in, what went out.
Some months go up. Some don't. A down month gets recorded exactly like an up one — no warning colors, no lecture. The point of a monthly record is that it's honest about all of it, not just the good months.
Every snapshot becomes one point on a line. History shows the full run, unedited — including the down months, recorded without comment. Overview shows where you stand right now against where you started.
Nothing here is trying to alarm you into a decision. A chart that goes down for a month is just what happened that month.
Same numbers, same math, five different voices — Classic, Ledger, Understory, Sunday Paper, and Journal. Switch anytime in Settings; nothing about your data changes, only how it reads.
The forecast sketches roughly two years ahead, with the uncertainty left in rather than smoothed over. Two toggles let you press on it: “Explore a range of outcomes” lets you pick how much your income or spending typically varies, showing a simulated band instead of one confident line. “Stress test a sudden expense” adds a one-time bill to see how it ripples through the rest of the projection. Both are projections, never promises.
Your notebook lives in one local file on your device. If you set a passphrase (recommended — at least 12 characters, and there's no way to recover a forgotten one, not even us), it's encrypted at rest with a key derived from that passphrase alone. Once you unlock it for the session, it's as accessible as any other local app.
If you turn on Cloud sync, the same file syncs to a self-hosted server — stored data is encrypted at rest, and the connection itself runs over HTTPS — so it's available from more than one device. That's opt-in, not the default, and it never replaces the local copy on your own device.
Export to JSON any time from Settings → Backup — every snapshot, every field, in one file you can keep or move anywhere. Nothing is trapped in a proprietary format, and nothing about WorthOS ever phones home to check whether you still have an account.
What WorthOS is not
It never recommends a fund, a card, or a specific financial decision — the forecast describes what your numbers imply, not what to do about them. For anything more than that, talk to a professional who can actually see your whole situation.
The first snapshot takes about ten minutes.