I got sick of my spreadsheet, so I built a free UK net worth tracker

The spreadsheet that started it

I'm Liam. I built WealthR in the evenings and at weekends, around a full-time job, mostly because I was fed up with my own spreadsheet.

It did the basic sums fine. What it could not do was show me the one thing I actually cared about, which was where all of this was heading. I could see this month's total. I could not see my future. And a spreadsheet forgets. If my investments dropped one month, six months later I would be staring at the dip with no idea why. Was it a bad market? A big one-off cost? The number was there, but the story behind it was gone.

What I wanted was simple. Add my figures each month, watch the line move across the year, and jot a quick note next to each entry. "Down this month, paid for a wedding." "Up a fair bit, markets had a mad week." Little scraps of commentary that a bare spreadsheet loses completely, and that turn out to be the difference between a number and a story you can actually learn from.

Nothing I could find did that for a UK person without either charging a monthly subscription or asking to plug straight into my bank. So I built it myself.

Why the core is free, and always will be

Here is the real reason, not the marketing one. Seeing your own financial projection is genuinely powerful. There is a specific kind of comfort in watching a plausible version of your future appear on a screen and realising it can be sorted, as long as you put a plan in place. I did not think that feeling should sit behind a paywall.

Charging for the projection would have felt wrong. The whole point was an app that ordinary people could benefit from without handing over a big chunk of money. If the core job is helping you see whether you are on track for a comfortable retirement, including modelling the grim stuff like a market crash and what it does to your final pot, then that job should be free.

Earlier is better, obviously. The sooner you can see the shape of your future, the more time you have to change it. But I will be honest about who actually pays me so far. A lot of my paying customers are in their late fifties, thinking hard about retirement and wanting to know how they have done. If that is you, this was built with you in mind too. You have the least time to spend guessing and the most to gain from seeing it laid out plainly.

"If it's free, am I the product?"

Fair question, and the honest answer matters more than a slogan. No. I do not run ads, and I do not sell or rent your data. I never will.

WealthR does not ask to link your bank either. You add your figures yourself. Some people find that slower, and I would argue that is the point. You stay close to your own numbers instead of letting a feed wash over you once a month.

So how do the lights stay on? A small, optional Pro tier, and that is it. Pro adds a handful of extras that heavier users want. The core stays free forever, because the free core is the entire reason I built the thing. If Pro had never existed, the free app would still be the app.

Most "free" tiers are designed to annoy you

We have all met the other kind of free. The tier so stripped back that it exists only to nudge you towards paying. The one you quietly abandon after a month because it never actually did anything for you.

I wanted the opposite. Every single user, paying or not, should get a real feel for how they are doing and where they are heading. So the free tier is not a demo with the good bits greyed out. It is the full app.

On the free tier you get net worth tracking across everything you own, the full UK income tax calculator (Scottish bands included, along with the High Income Child Benefit Charge and Marriage Allowance), FIRE and retirement forecasting, a Monte Carlo stress test that runs thousands of versions of your future, ISA, SIPP and State Pension tracking, a dividend planner, property, an eleven-stream retirement income view, buy-to-let cashflow, a budget tab, and 23 standalone UK calculators. No card, no bank linking, no expiry.

I have genuinely bundled more into the free tier than a lot of apps put behind their paywall. If you want the blow-by-blow of how it stacks up against Emma, Moneyhub, Snoop and the rest, I wrote an honest review of all seven UK net worth trackers, mine included, flaws and all.

UK first, and I mean it

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was that almost nothing was built for a UK person in the first place. The big US apps either cannot connect to UK accounts, or simply do not have the UK tax fields, so the numbers come out wrong for anyone here. They want a bigger slice of a huge market, which is fair enough. I am not trying to serve the world. I am here for the UK, and only the UK.

Because I am from Edinburgh, I know first-hand that Scotland has its own income tax bands, and that a tool which quietly assumes rest-of-UK rates hands a Scottish user a wrong answer with a straight face. So every nation of the UK is covered properly rather than bolted on, and ISAs, SIPPs and the State Pension are all treated the way they actually work here.

Will I ever build a US version? Never say never. But let's get to 10,000 UK users first.

If the phrase "net worth" itself still feels a bit abstract, I wrote a plain-English piece on what net worth actually is and whether your house counts. Start there, then come back.

The April ritual

A finance tool is only as trustworthy as its most out-of-date number. So every April, when the new tax year lands, I sit down and refresh the whole app. New bands, new allowances, new limits, across every calculator and every tab.

This matters more than it sounds. A tool that quietly goes stale becomes quietly wrong, and a wrong number is worse than no number, because you trust it. I want WealthR to be the thing you open for two to five minutes each month, update, and actually believe.

We were lucky on timing. WealthR launched in the spring, right at the start of a fresh tax year, so it started life current. The job now is keeping it that way, every April, for as long as the app exists.

Where it's honestly not for you

I would rather tell you the truth than win you as a mismatched user who leaves disappointed. WealthR probably is not for you if you are not investing at all and you are a long way from retirement, with your money sitting in a savings account. There is not much of a future line to project yet.

Even then, I would gently point you at the guides. I have written a fair pile of them, in the app and out here on the blog and the free tools pages, precisely so anyone can build a solid base of understanding first. I never give advice, but I am happy to hand you the map. A good starting point is the free UK calculators I actually use.

And the free tier does not do everything. The things that sit in Pro are the ones you tend to want only once you are properly stuck in: read-only share links to send an adviser or your partner, downloadable PDFs of your assets and investments, tracking more than one property or a fuller set of assets, and the deeper tax and estate planning tools. None of it is needed to get the core value. It is there for people who have outgrown the basics.

Who it's really for

If I had to draw the person WealthR is for, it would be someone who wants to retire comfortably and would like to know, honestly, whether they are on course. And, just as much, someone close to retirement who wants a clear read on how they have actually done.

Genuinely, though, I built it to be for almost everyone. The one group it is probably not for is the very wealthy, who already have an IFA, a wall of tools, and their projections worked out to the penny.

One last honest thing. A lot of my near-retirement users write in with brilliant, specific questions, and I often cannot answer them, because I am not a financial adviser and I will not pretend to be. What I can do is point people in the right direction, even when that direction is not WealthR. Sometimes the most useful thing I can send someone is a government support page, and I would far rather do that than fake an answer.

From spreadsheet to something you'll actually open

If you are still living in a net worth spreadsheet, I understand completely. I was you for years. It works right up until the moment you want to look forward instead of back, or you want to remember why a number moved. That is the gap WealthR fills, and the core of it costs nothing.

Frequently asked

This is general information, not financial advice. The figures WealthR shows are illustrative and depend on the inputs you provide. For decisions involving significant sums, please consult a qualified FCA-regulated financial adviser.