About Spent — The Editorial Mission
The Editor’s Note
I spent eight years inside payment systems.
Now I want to translate them.
My name is Henrik Vance. I worked as a payments engineer at Stripe and Klarna for eight years — building merchant onboarding systems, dispute infrastructure, and small-business products. The work taught me one thing above everything else: the gap between what fintech vendors say their tools do and what the tools actually do, in the hands of a working business, is enormous.
I took over Spent to close that gap. Every review on this site is written by someone who has actually built or operated the tool, not by someone reading the marketing page. That’s the entire editorial standard. The rest is just execution.
Why Spent
exists.
Our editorial premise
Financial tooling for the self-employed is structurally underserved. Personal-finance media still treats freelancers and small business owners as edge cases. Trade press writes for finance teams that don’t exist in companies of one. Software vendors write marketing pages about themselves. The actual people running real financial operations on their own — freelancers, agency owners, creators, small business operators — have to figure most of it out from the inside.
Spent occupies the missing middle. We write for working freelancers, small business owners, and creators — people who run real financial operations without a finance team behind them. We believe the tools, payment platforms, and workflows that move money through small business deserve serious editorial coverage, not vendor marketing copy or generic personal-finance advice.
By combining honest reviews of fintech infrastructure (Stripe, Adyen, Klarna), practical workflow guides (invoicing, dunning, accounting), and analysis of the self-employed financial stack as a system rather than a collection of tools, we provide the picture that nobody else is drawing. We explain how each tool works, but more importantly, we explain how the tools fit together.
How we cover financial tooling.
A note on our heritage & transparency.
The Spent domain has a history that predates the current editorial publication. It was originally established by a small fintech team building an automated expense-tracking and cash-back consumer application. The original team is widely credited with one of the earlier serious attempts at AI-driven personal finance categorisation, and built a meaningful audience in the budgeting-app space between 2017 and 2021.
We acquired the domain in 2026 to continue the broader spirit of that mission — making financial tooling accessible and comprehensible to people who don’t work in finance. However, the editorial direction is now entirely separate from the original application’s product roadmap.
Spent now operates under fully independent editorial ownership. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, nor claim successorship to the original Spent App, its founders, or its former operators. The application no longer functions, and historical app data is not accessible through this site. We maintain total editorial independence. We do not accept paid reviews from fintech vendors, nor do we run sponsored content masquerading as analysis.
Get in touch.
Reader requests
Stuck on the financial side?
Our editorial calendar is driven by what readers actually struggle with. If you’re wrestling with Stripe Connect onboarding, an invoicing-to-accounting export, a tax categorisation question, or a payment processor decision — write in. We turn the most common reader questions into full-length guides.
Fintech vendors
Pitching a tool?
We test new payment processors, invoicing tools, accounting platforms, and adjacent fintech infrastructure regularly. You are welcome to pitch your platform to the editorial desk. Please note: a briefing is not a transaction. We do not accept payment in exchange for positive coverage, and we may publish a review that you would prefer we hadn’t.