A Melbourne founder, one paying customer, and an opinion about what Australian small businesses are actually paying for.
I'm Daniel. I live in Melbourne and I spent most of 2025 angry at my bookkeeping software.
I'd been paying Xero about $35 a month for features I never touched. Every BAS quarter I'd sit down for a half-day wrestling with a chart of accounts that was built for a CPA, not a sole trader doing his own books in between actual work. The tool was powerful. It wasn't mine.
I tried MYOB. I tried a spreadsheet. I tried the "I'll deal with it at tax time" approach — which, as anyone who's done that knows, is not an approach so much as a future emergency.
So I built Summed. It started as a weekend project: what if the bookkeeping app just told you what you made today, kept the GST straight, and quietly built your BAS in the background? What if it was priced so that a sparkie in Penrith or a cafe in Brunswick could actually afford it — not $35, not $33, but $9 a month?
The first version ran on my own business. It saved me about four hours a quarter. I shipped it publicly in early 2026. At the time of writing, Summed has one paying customer who isn't me. I'm building in public, one feature at a time, and every decision is weighted by whether I'd happily pay for it on my own small business.
If you're an Australian small business owner who wants a tool built by someone who does the same kind of work you do — welcome. If you find something broken, email me directly. I'm not hiding behind a support desk.
Summed is hosted on AWS in the Sydney region (ap-southeast-2). Your transactions, receipts, and reports don't leave the country in the normal course of business. They sit behind Australian jurisdiction, encrypted end-to-end.
We keep your records for a minimum of five years after you close your account, because that's what the ATO requires for business records. You can export or delete your data any time — see our Privacy Policy for the full detail.
We believe in showing up before we big-note ourselves.
Daniel runs Summed from Melbourne. He writes the code, answers the support emails, and lodges the BAS on Summed itself. When you email support@summed.com.au, he's the one writing back.
Every product decision gets tested against these. If it doesn't pass, it doesn't ship.
You should not need to know what a "journal entry" is to run a cafe. Every screen, report, and email is written the way a real person would explain it over a cuppa.
No 90%-off three-month promo that snaps back to full price. No bait-and-switch. What you pay in month one is what you pay in month twelve. When we put the price up, we'll tell you why.
You can export everything, any day, one click. No "contact sales to retrieve your data" nonsense. If you leave, you leave whole — and we keep the minimum the ATO requires, nothing more.