Why we built Ukelønn — the founder's story

I’ll be honest: I had no plans to build an app when this started. I had plans to avoid making a spreadsheet.

If you’ve been following Ukelønn lately, you may have wondered who’s behind it. There’s a good reason we haven’t talked about it much — we’ve been busy building — but four years into the project, with nearly 6,000 families now using the app, maybe it’s time. This is the story of how it began, why it’s still free, and where we think we want to take it next.

It started at the kitchen table

It was an autumn evening in 2021. My oldest kids were getting old enough to want pocket money. The question came, the way it does: “How much do Emma and Thomas get?” The answer was: I have no idea. How much should a 7-year-old get? What about siblings of different ages? What do you do when you forget a week?

I did what every programmer does when they have a problem: I opened Excel.

The first attempt was a spreadsheet with names and amounts. The second attempt had columns for chores. The third had formulas for monthly totals. After six weeks I had a monster of a spreadsheet that only I could navigate, and that the kids had no relationship to at all. It worked for me — but it taught the children nothing, because they never saw it. My own parents did exactly the same thing with a little notebook when I was small. That was 30 years ago, and we’re at the same point.

I thought: somebody must have built an app for this. I started looking.

There were apps — but not in Norwegian

This is where it got strange. There were a few apps in English — mostly American ones, with all their bank integrations and solutions that don’t work in Norway. There was one Swedish app, which had a partly Norwegian interface but odd translations and no understanding of Norwegian realities like BSU (a Norwegian tax-favoured youth savings account), Vipps (Norway’s everyday mobile payment app), or how Norwegian families actually talk about money. And there were a few bank-tied apps locked to one specific bank.

None of them fit. And I thought, like so many developers before me: “How hard can it be?”

I know the answer now. It’s hard.

2.5 years of quiet building

From the first line of code in January 2022 to the first stable version I dared let other people use — it took two and a half years. That’s a good deal longer than I expected.

There are many reasons for that. I have a full-time job. I have a family. App development isn’t a hobby project you tinker with in the evening — it demands long, unbroken stretches of focus. And there’s always something new that pops up. Push notifications that don’t work. Parent accounts that have to be shared between two adults. Magic-link sign-in that has to work for 8-year-olds with no password. iOS behaving differently from Android. A million small details that aren’t really app development, but that all have to be in place before anyone can trust the app with their children.

The summer I almost gave up was in 2023. I had built three iterations of cross-device syncing, and nothing worked properly. There were three weeks where I didn’t write a single line of code. I opened the editor and closed it again. What brought me back was showing a prototype to a colleague with three kids. She said: “When is this ready? I need it.” That was enough to get me through.

Zero marketing budget

When the first version came out in 2024, I had a plan for marketing. It was simple: no marketing.

It wasn’t an ideological decision. I simply had no money for it. There were no investors, no angel, no budget for Facebook ads. The app sat quietly on the App Store for three months with maybe 40 users. They were all friends.

Then something unexpected happened. Kode24 (a Norwegian tech news outlet for developers) wrote an article about the app. I’d sent them a polite note without expecting much, and they liked the story enough to publish it. The article went viral in Norwegian developer circles. In two days the number of downloads went from 10 a day to 800. A week later we were at 3,000 users. And from there it has grown steadily.

All without a single krone spent on marketing.

It’s been both a blessing and a constraint. The blessing is that we’ve been able to concentrate on building, not selling. The constraint is that growth has been organic and slow. But I think maybe that’s right. Family apps are built on trust, and trust isn’t built on advertising.

Why is it free?

This is what people ask us most often. And it’s a little tiring to answer, because there really isn’t a clever business answer. There’s only a matter-of-principle answer.

The best family app for Norwegian children shouldn’t be reserved for those who can afford it.

I grew up in a family where money was sometimes tight. My parents would not have subscribed to an app like this. It would have been yet another monthly charge that felt silly to spend on “something Mum can do in a spreadsheet.” And I know there are plenty of families in Norway right now in exactly that situation.

So we don’t charge. That means parents on a tight budget — precisely the ones who most need to teach their kids about money — can use the app for free. It isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s a choice.

But how do you make money, then?

Not yet. That’s the short answer.

We run on the surplus from my own job, in practice. The costs of running the app — servers, App Store fees, push notifications — are low enough that I can handle them without breaking. It isn’t a sustainable model in the long run, and I know it. But we have time before we have to make that call.

What we’re looking at is a possible bank partnership in the future. The idea is: a large bank could offer integration with Ukelønn as part of its family product, and pay us for the service. The user would pay nothing extra. That’s the model that feels most in line with the principles.

What we will not do: take on ads. Sell user data. Introduce a subscription that locks basic features behind a paywall. Those are red lines. If we can’t fund the app without crossing them, we’d rather shut it down.

What have we learned?

Three things, mostly:

People want it simple, not clever. I built the first version full of advanced features — role-based access, complex chore conditions, overrides. People barely used any of it. They wanted: add a child, add a chore, pay out. The rest is noise.

Language matters a lot. Building a Norwegian app for Norwegian families, with Norwegian terms and Norwegian culture, has mattered far more than I expected. Users often say the thing that made the difference was that the app “just felt right.” That’s the culture.

Parents of young children are patient, but not infinitely. They forgive a bug the first time. Not the second time. That has pushed us to prioritise stability over new features — and it’s probably the main reason the app now works for tens of thousands of families.

What now?

We’re nearly 6,000 families. That’s more than I dreamed of when I opened Excel that autumn evening. The plan now is to keep making the app better — not bigger. We’re careful about what we add. We want Ukelønn to keep being something parents trust, not a growth machine.

If you’re reading this and thinking about building your own idea — one thing I’ll say: build it. Don’t wait for the right moment, the right technology, the investor. No one is going to come along and do it for you. And you’ll learn more from the three weeks you almost give up than from all the courses you could have taken.

We’re building on. If you have an idea for what we should do next, send me an email at post@ukelonn.no. I read everything.

If you’re new to Ukelønn and want to read a little about how Norwegian families use it, take a look at how much weekly allowance in 2026 or Ukelønn vs pocket money.