Found vs ExactSplit: holding your money, or telling you what to do with it
Found is business banking with tax tools built in. ExactSplit is a tax engine that never touches your money. That is the whole difference, and it cuts both ways.
Update. Update: ExactSplit now offers an optional wallet for the reserve, provided by Whop and held by its partner banks. The difference this post describes stands. ExactSplit never holds your money, the wallet is opt-in, and the product works exactly the same with a savings account at your own bank.
Different categories entirely
Found is a business bank account for the self-employed. You deposit into it, spend from it, and it sets aside a tax portion automatically into a separate bucket inside the account. The tax features exist because the money is already there. It is banking with tax bolted on.
ExactSplit holds nothing. There is no account, no card, no transfer, no payment rail anywhere in the product. It connects read-only to the bank accounts you already have, computes what you owe, tells you what to move, and checks that you did. It is a calculation and tracking product with a deliberate decision never to become a financial institution.
Why never holding money is a feature
The moment a product holds customer funds, it takes on a different regulatory posture: partner bank relationships, money transmission questions, Regulation E, and a compliance burden that has to be paid for somewhere. That is fine for a company built to be a bank. It shapes everything about what the product can do and how fast it can change.
ExactSplit's read-only posture means the Plaid connection cannot move money, the access tokens are encrypted at rest and never returned by any endpoint, and the worst realistic failure is a wrong number rather than a wrong transfer. It also means you keep the bank you already have, with whatever rates, features, and relationships come with it.
The set-aside, compared
Found sets aside a percentage. That percentage is, as far as we can tell, an estimate applied to deposits. ExactSplit derives the per-deposit rate from the actual safe harbor: 90 percent of the projected current year tax or 100 or 110 percent of last year's, whichever is lower, less withholding, over projected income. The rate is the number that, if you follow it on every deposit, lands you exactly on the safe harbor at year end.
The tracking is different too. Because ExactSplit does not hold the reserve, it has to watch it. It reads the balance of whichever account you designate, subtracts a baseline for money that was already there, nets out the estimated payments you record, and reports the gap. A nudge fires when the gap exceeds one quarter's payment. You get the discipline of an automatic sweep without the product holding the money.
Where Found wins
Found actually moves the money. If you want the set-aside to happen without you doing anything, a bank that sweeps into a tax bucket is the only way to get that. ExactSplit tells you what to move and checks that you did, but the transfer is yours to make. For someone who knows they will not follow through, that is a real difference, and it is why our own roadmap treats same-name transfers as something to consider only once we have data on whether people actually move the money themselves.
Found is also a bank account. If you do not have a separate business account yet, getting one and a tax tool in a single signup is genuinely convenient.
We are not quoting prices. They change. Check both sites.
What ExactSplit does that a bank does not
The engine. Self-employment tax with the 400 dollar floor, 2026 brackets, section 199A with its limits, both safe harbor tests, all cited. A retirement optimizer that solves the circular solo 401(k) employer contribution and measures savings after the 199A clawback. An S-corp crossover model with costs and the 199A effect in both directions. Mileage rated by trip date with all four substantiation fields enforced. A Schedule C export with the caveats written in. A bookkeeping assistant that answers from tested arithmetic and refuses to advise.
A bank's tax tools are there to make the bank more useful. ExactSplit's bookkeeping is there to make the tax number right. The priorities show.
What has been added since, and where the line still is
Found holds your money, and this post argued that ExactSplit's choice not to is a feature. Since then we have added the closest thing to money movement we intend to build: when your reserve falls behind, the app proposes a transfer for the gap, you approve it, you make it at your bank, and the feed confirms it when the deposit appears. The approval is a decision; the transfer is yours. There is no payment rail, no funding account, and no moment at which your money is anywhere but your own bank.
We have also added a safe-to-pay-yourself figure, which is the answer Found's product gives by holding your money and ours gives by doing arithmetic on it, and an accountant view with quarterly sign-off. The difference in philosophy is unchanged. One product wants to be your bank. The other wants your bank to stay your bank and to tell you exactly what to do with what is in it.
The short version
If you want a bank that sweeps a percentage into a tax bucket for you, Found does that and ExactSplit does not. If you want to keep your own bank, see exactly how your number is computed, get a per-deposit instruction derived from the real safe harbor, and have the reserve checked without anyone holding it, that is ExactSplit.
Not tax advice. Estimates only. Confirm anything material with a CPA.
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