It was just another evening. Friday night, friends, beer, food.
The bill came. We split it, each paying our own share. Mine came to €40. Nothing unusual. We thanked each other and went home.
And somewhere between the restaurant and my bed, it hit me.
Wait. Forty euros. Not money. A few hours of my life.
A whole afternoon. Gone.
And I didn't hesitate for a second in that restaurant. I paid for it as automatically as I'd pay for a coffee.
I read the book ten years earlier
I wanted to start investing back then, but had no idea how. I was looking for something practical and stumbled onto Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin.
One idea from that book hit hard:
The price of anything isn't measured in money. It's measured in the hours of life you traded for it.
Not what does it cost?
But how much of your life are you willing to exchange for it?
It sounds dramatic. But once you start doing the math — especially on everyday things, not the big purchases — you end up in a strange mental state.
Something between relief ("ah, so that's why I'm always tired") and mild paranoia ("wait, is this really half an hour of my life?").
I started playing with the number in a spreadsheet. I'd punch in a price, look at the result, sigh, and move on.
The problem wasn't that I couldn't see it.
The problem was that nobody around me could.
The pattern is everywhere
Every day, we all trade pieces of our lives for things that never actually fulfill us.
And yes — I do it too.
I'd spend that €40 on a dinner with friends again tomorrow, because those relationships are worth it.
But the pattern is everywhere:
Someone buys a thing they'll stop using in two weeks.
Someone pays for a subscription they never open.
Someone buys something just because "it's on sale."
Each one is small.
Each one feels like "this is nothing."
But together?
A week of life. Sometimes more.
Ten years with a spreadsheet
I thought about this for ten years.
And for ten years, I did nothing about it.
Why?
Because a spreadsheet doesn't work in real life. You don't open it in a store when you're holding a pair of shoes. Or at the checkout. Or when you see a "last chance" deal.
The thought needs to hit you in the moment of decision.
Not at home, after it's already too late.
For years I kept telling myself that someone should build an app that does this. Simply.
Price in. Hours out.
So after ten years of thinking about it, I built it myself.
It's called Earned.
How it works
You open it. You type in a price. You see the hours of your life it costs.
That's it.
The app remembers your decisions: Skip it. Buy anyway. Not now.
It doesn't judge you. It doesn't tell you what to do. It just shows you the pattern.
And that pattern can be brutal.
My first month showed me that most of my hours went into things I'd have called "nothing." Small things.
€15 here.
€20 there.
€30 somewhere else.
Each one was nothing.
Together?
A week of my life.
What Earned is not
It's not a budget tracker. It doesn't care how much you have in your account.
It's not a moralizing app. It doesn't take your joy away.
If you want to buy those €89 shoes — buy them. You'll just know what you're trading for them.
It's not for rich people, and it's not for poor people.
Everyone has their own hourly rate. Everyone gets their own math.
And most importantly:
It's not an app that wants to eat more hours of your life.
You open it. You type. You see. You decide. You close it.
No ads.
No tracking.
No dark patterns.
Your data stays on your phone.
Who it's for
For me.
For friends.
For anyone the idea makes sense to.
For the person at the checkout, hesitating between two phones, not realizing the €400 difference is their entire weekend.
Two weeks after launch
So far, three people have bought it.
One of them was from Norway. And honestly, that made my day.
It's not a viral hit. It's probably never going to be.
But those three people said: "Yeah, this makes sense."
And that's enough to keep going.
How much it costs
€4.99 — one-time.
That's the whole calculator. The history. The budget. The widgets, the watch, the scanner. Yours. No subscription on top of it.
If you want a weekly reflection layer — a Monday note that reprices the week you just had in hours — there's an optional Time Pass on top. €1.99 a month, or €14.99 a year. You don't need it. The core idea works without it.
So — do the math yourself.
At an average hourly wage, €4.99 is maybe half an hour of work. For some people less, for some a little more.
If Earned saves you even one badly spent hour, it paid for itself.
If it doesn't — you spent half an hour on something that someone spent ten years thinking about before finally building it.