01What's actually behind the number
Over £1 million of real debt is now being tracked inside TrySnowball.
Not a forecast, not an estimate. Real numbers people typed in themselves. Cards, loans, overdrafts, store cards, car finance, the works. Every minimum payment, every APR, every quiet figure they'd been carrying around in their head, sometimes for years.
For most of those people, it was the first time the full number had been written down anywhere at all.
That's the bit worth noting. Not the headline. The fact that it's not hiding in monthly statements anymore.
02What this isn't
It isn't a milestone in the way a startup uses the word. We're not raising money off the back of it, we're not doing a victory lap. £1 million of personal debt isn't really something to celebrate.
If anything, it's sobering. Each entry behind that number is a household making minimum payments on something that's been quietly growing in the background while they got on with their life. Most of it is normal. A card from a hard month. A balance transfer that ran out. A 0% deal that turned into 24.9% APR while no-one was looking. A loan that felt small until somebody totalled the interest.
We didn't earn this number. The people using the app did, by typing it in.
03What we've actually learned
The first debt is harder to add than the rest by a long way. People sit on the empty screen for minutes. After the second one, they're flying. Whatever stops them at the first number isn't laziness, it's the moment it stops being abstract.
Most people don't know their debt-free date until the calculator tells them. They know what they owe, roughly. They know what they pay each month, roughly. The date that connects the two has been a blur. When it shows up, it's usually a bit closer than they were braced for.
People also come back. Add their debts, vanish for a couple of months, log in to update the balances. Honestly, that gap is just life. The plan's still here when they want to look again.
04What's next
The single most common message we get is some version of: "I know what I owe. I just don't know where the money to pay it down is meant to come from."
That's what we're working on. Not budgeting in the proper boring sense, not bank scraping, definitely not lecturing anyone about their oat flat white. Something more like: where is the spend that should be going on your debts? Quietly. No moralising.
It'll be opt-in and honest. More on it when there's something worth showing.
05If you're reading this
If you've been carrying a number around in your head and putting off totalling it up, that's normal. The first figure really is the hardest to write down. After that it tends to behave.
You can add yours here, free, in under a minute. No credit check. No bank access. Just a calculator that takes you at your word.