It's Sunday. You're scrolling your subscription list, deciding what stays and what goes. Some of those line items are about to get cancelled. The ones that survive are the ones that earned it. Marvin Money is built to be one of the ones that survive — and the price is part of how.
Why we priced it this way
Most money apps charge somewhere between $9 and $15 a month. Some of that goes into the app you actually open. A lot of it goes into what sits underneath — the third parties that charge per user, every month, regardless of whether you used their connection that month or not. Those fees get passed straight through into your subscription.
We built Marvin Money without those layers. Which means we don't pay them. Which means we don't charge you for them. That's most of the price difference.
Less costly, not cheap
There's a difference, and it's worth being clear about.
Cheap means corners cut on the things you actually use. Rushed screens, generated copy, support that treats you like a ticket. You can tell where the savings came from — they came from the app.
Less costly means the savings came from somewhere else. The app got the same hours, the design got the same care, the team got the same time. What we skipped was the third-party tax. The savings show up in the price, not in the product.
The trade we asked you to make
Marvin Money asks you to upload a statement or snap a receipt instead of watching transactions auto-import. A few seconds, twice a month. That's the swap.
It's a real swap. We're not pretending the upload step is free for you — it isn't. But it's small, it gets faster with practice, and on the other side of it the price stays small too.
The keeper test
Most subscriptions can't pass the cancel-list test. The streaming service you forgot about. The fitness app you opened twice. The meal kit that became a chore. They didn't earn their place — they just signed you up and kept billing.
Marvin Money has to earn its slot every month. The forecast, the verdict on the affordability question, the chat that actually answers. If we ever stop earning it, you'll cancel — that's the design. Make the value visible enough that the cancel decision doesn't have to happen.
Sunday, 11pm
You'll cancel something this month. Most months, most people do. We built Marvin Money the way we did so it isn't the one.
Less costly, not cheap. That's the whole story.
For the discipline behind why your money should sit in your account a little longer, see why the day the bill arrives isn't the day to pay it. For the moment when "which subscriptions do I cut" stops being abstract, see when the job ends on a Tuesday.