About Fewigu: a budgeting app built around uneven pay

Most budgeting tools assume you earn the same amount on the same day every month. If you are a freelancer, a tradesperson, a seasonal worker or a gig driver, you know how little that matches your life. Fewigu exists for the people that assumption leaves out.

We are a six-person team working from 34 Eyre Street in Sheffield. This page explains how the company started, what we are trying to do, how we make decisions and what we have learned since 2012.

How it started

Fewigu began in 2012 as a spreadsheet. One of our founders was working as a self-employed electrician at the time, and some months brought in three times what others did. The family budget kept breaking, not because anyone spent carelessly, but because every standard template divided a fixed salary into fixed categories. A good month made the plan look generous. A thin month made it fall apart.

The spreadsheet worked differently. It did not ask what you earn per month. It asked what you need to cover in the next few weeks, what is already on its way, and what you can safely set aside from the money that has actually arrived. Friends who were also self-employed asked for copies. Then their friends did. Within a year it was clear that a spreadsheet was the wrong container for the idea, and the first version of the app followed.

Early on we made a decision that still shapes the company: we would talk to the people using the product, in person where possible. That habit is why the app today handles things a purely technical team might never think of, such as an invoice that is paid in two instalments, or a month in which the tax bill lands before the money to cover it.

What we are trying to do

Our mission is simple to state and harder to carry out: help people with irregular income plan their money without needing a regular paycheque to do it. We do not try to make you earn more, and we do not sell financial products. The app is a planning tool, and its job ends when you can look at your accounts and know what is safe to spend this week.

Our longer-term view is that irregular work is not a temporary phase for a growing share of the workforce, so the tools for it should not feel like workarounds. A budget for variable pay should be a first-class design problem, not a feature bolted onto software made for salaried households.

In practice, that view translates into a few concrete working principles:

• Plan from money received, not money expected. The app treats confirmed income as the base and expected income as a separate, clearly labelled layer, so a late client payment does not quietly wreck your numbers.
• Build a buffer before anything else. New users are guided to set up a buffer covering bills due in the coming weeks before they allocate anything to savings goals or discretionary spending.
• Keep the tax bill visible. For self-employed users, a share of each payment can be set aside as it arrives, so the amount owed to HMRC at the January and July deadlines is not a surprise.
• Show the range, not one number. Forecasts display a lower and an upper estimate based on your own history, because a single figure suggests certainty that irregular income does not have.

The values we work by

Values written on a website mean little unless they change what a team does on a Tuesday afternoon. These are the ones that have actually affected our decisions.

• Plain language. Money is stressful enough without jargon. We write every screen, every email and every help article so that someone reading it tired, after a long shift, still understands it on the first pass.
• Honesty about limits. Fewigu is a budgeting tool. We say so clearly, and we do not promise outcomes. It cannot guarantee that you will save a certain amount or that your income will stabilise, and we will not suggest otherwise.
• Privacy as a default. We collect the data the app needs to function and nothing that serves only advertising. Your financial details are yours, and our privacy policy states exactly what we hold and why.
• Respect for your time. Entering transactions should take seconds. When a task in the app takes longer than it should, we treat that as a bug, not as a feature request.

Experience and where we are now

Fourteen years of building one product has given us a particular kind of knowledge. We have watched how people with variable income actually behave across good years and bad ones, and that history shapes the decisions we make today. The figures below describe the scale of that work.

Founded

2012, in Sheffield

Team

6 people

Services offered

9

People supported in total

1,092

Completed jobs

1,802

Clients who came back for a second job

342

Typical reply to an enquiry

About 3 hours

Areas served

6 districts

That works out at roughly 78 new people a year. We keep the number deliberately modest. A small client base means a six-person team can still answer questions properly, read the feedback and make changes in response to it, rather than letting requests pile up in a queue. About one in three of the people we have worked with has returned for a second piece of work, which tells us more about usefulness than any survey could.

Our team covers product design, software development, customer support and financial-literacy research. Support is not outsourced: the person who answers your question sits within a few metres of the person who can change the app. When someone writes in with a problem we had not anticipated, it often becomes a change in the next release.

We are open Monday to Friday, 08:30 to 19:00, which is deliberate. Many of our users work shifts or run their own businesses, and a support desk that closes at 17:00 is of little help to someone who finishes work at 17:30. Weekends are closed, so the team can stay sustainable and keep doing this work for the long term.

What we have learned above all is that there is no single correct budget for variable pay. There are only methods that fit the way your income arrives and the way your bills fall due. Our task is to make those methods easier to set up and easier to stick with.