budgeting

Can I Justify Spending $744 on Marketing Tools in 2026? What I Learned About Finluency While Deciding

I modeled a $744 annual marketing stack—Webflow, Ghost, Mailchimp—to see if I could justify the cost as a pre-revenue solopreneur. The cash flow impact surprised me, and the process revealed where Finluency needs clearer budgeting, better filtering, and a more intuitive view of constraints.

Mark Masavage

Mark Masavage

— 2 min read
A workspace with a laptop showing a cash flow dashboard and handwritten budgeting notes, representing financial decision-making and evaluating marketing tool costs.
Modeling the real cash flow impact before spending $744 on tools.

I have been considering moving away from HubSpot's marketing platform and using Webflow, Notion, and Mailchimp because of its complexity. I am also exploring Ghost for my personal blog.

Webflow and Ghost have an immediate cost impact that I have avoided by using HubSpot's free plan for Finluency's website and a low-cost Medium subscription for my personal blog. Even though the total yearly cost of all the platforms is relatively low at $744, it still has an impact. As a bootstrapping solopreneur, all business expenses impact my personal finances. The money has to come from somewhere, and when you are pre-revenue, it will come out of your personal accounts.

Fortunately, cash flow management is precisely why I am building Finluency, so I plugged in the number to see the impact and learned a few things about the tool.

Here are the steps I took.

Step 1: Collected My 2026 Monthly Business Budget Information

Early in December, I planned my whole year of bills, forecasted expenses, and budgeted and projected incomes using Finluency.

My business budget was set at $400 a month, and I already have monthly expenses that eat up part of it. Also, there are months when I have more expenses than others, so a general 400-a-month budget does not paint a clear picture; I wanted to set each month's budget independently.

This proved to be challenging.

The category filter set to budget returns all budget items. I had to sift through all the budget items for the year to find the allocations for the business budgets.

Finluency's Budget Transactions

Step 2: Collected the year's business budgets into a spreadsheet

Since I couldn't get a clear view of the year's business budgets in the app, I had to resort to putting them in a spreadsheet.

This is common for financial analysis, but I feel this should be handled in Finluency.

Step 3: Adjusting the budgets

Using the spreadsheet, I adjusted the budgets based on when I planned to incur business expenses. This provides me with a more accurate forecast for the year.

Step 4: Adjusted the budgets in Finluency

Wanting to capture these adjustments in Finluency, I updated each month's business budget transaction accordingly.

What I learned from this real-world case

Opportunity

  • All budget transactions are created with a budget category, so filtering for the budget category returns all budget transactions.

Short Term Solution

  • Add a filter for budget name.
    This creates visibility without redesigning the sytem.
  • Budget Category -> Umbrella
  • Budgte Name -> The disambiguator
  • Result: Isolated budgets

Long Term

  • A more robust budget display that answers the questions people actually have.

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