WHY EKKO EXISTS
Personal finance was built for individuals. EKKO is built for the people you actually love.
A behavioural operating system designed around kotahitanga — the te reo Māori principle of standing together. Free forever for whānau, couples, flatmates, and crews who want to reach goals as one.
THE PROBLEM
The individual scene hasn't worked in 100 years.
Every personal finance app since the 1920s has assumed money is a solo discipline. Track your own budget. Build your own savings. Watch your own net worth grow.
It hasn't worked. Most households still live paycheck to paycheck. Most savings goals get abandoned. Most families never have the money conversation that would actually change their trajectory.
Why? Because money has never been an individual problem. It's a household problem, a whānau problem, a collective problem. The tools we use to solve it have been pointed in the wrong direction.
KiwiSaver is the clearest example. It locks you in individually. Your partner's KiwiSaver sits in a separate account. Your siblings can't pool theirs. Five whānau members couldn't combine to a single house-deposit fund. So they don't — and each takes 8 years to reach the same goal one collective effort could hit in 18 months.
EKKO exists because the problem isn't math. It's structure.
THE SOLUTION
Collective first. Solo as an on-ramp.
EKKO inverts the assumption. Tools work alone — but they exist to feed the group decision. You run the Budget Builder, you find your leftover, you bring it to your people. Your people do the same. Together you decide what you commit. The collective number becomes the savings goal.
The chart shows the truth: together is faster. Always. Not by a little — by months or years depending on the group size. The math is simple. The cultural shift is the whole point.
No leaderboards. No rankings. No comparisons. Your contribution is visible to your group (because trust is what makes whānau function), but the collective number is always the hero. We are moving together — not racing each other.
HOW IT WORKS
Three tiers. The first one is the whole product.
Free
Plan with your people. Forever.
- ·Kotahitanga groups (up to 50 members)
- ·Budget Builder, Savings Calculator
- ·Real Hourly Rate, Debt Slayer
- ·Manual entry, full projections
- ·Invite via link or friends list
Utility · $10/wk
Connect real bank accounts.
- ·Akahu open banking integration
- ·Real balances read automatically
- ·Actual vs projected on every chart
- ·Mini Arena access ($720 pool)
Gold · $20/wk
Automation + payment movement.
- ·Auto-transfer to group savings vehicle
- ·Enduring weekly consent (set once, runs)
- ·Full Arena game + coaching insights
- ·Prize pool participation
Utility and Gold are progressively coming online. The free tier is fully working today.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Things people ask before signing up.
Is EKKO actually free?+
Yes. The Kotahitanga planning tool, Budget Builder, Savings Calculator, Real Hourly Rate, and Debt Slayer are all free forever. No card required. No 'taste of the real thing.' The free tier is the product. Paid tiers (Utility, Gold) add automation — real bank connection via Akahu, automatic transfers, and the Arena game — but the free tools work on their own.
What does Kotahitanga mean?+
Kotahitanga is te reo Māori for unity, standing together, collective action. In EKKO it means: instead of saving alone, you save with your whānau, flatmates, partner, or friends. The chart shows how much faster you reach a goal together than alone. The math is simple. The cultural shift is the whole point.
Why is the founder Māori — does that matter?+
Yes, structurally. Three quarters of the world thinks about money collectively (whānau, family, community). Fintech only serves the other quarter. EKKO is built from a worldview where money is a household decision, not a solo one. Being Māori isn't biographical detail — it's the product's structural integrity.
How is this different from KiwiSaver?+
KiwiSaver locks you in individually. Your money sits in your account, separate from your partner's, separate from your whānau. EKKO is the opposite: a group of 5 people in a Kotahitanga group saving for a house deposit reach it faster than any one of them could alone. KiwiSaver is individual by design. EKKO is collective by design. Both can exist — but EKKO solves the problem KiwiSaver doesn't.
Do I need to connect my bank account?+
No. The free tier is manual entry only — you type in your weekly savings, your group decides what to contribute, the chart projects forward. No banking data ever touches EKKO unless you upgrade to a paid tier AND explicitly authorise Akahu (NZ open banking) to share read-only data with EKKO. Even then, EKKO never sees your bank credentials.
How do my private numbers stay private in a group?+
Your weekly contribution is visible to other members of your Kotahitanga group — that's how collective trust works in whānau. But there are no leaderboards, no rankings, no 'X is contributing more than you' framing. The collective number is always the hero. The group exists to move together, not to compare.
What's the Arena?+
The Arena is EKKO's behavioural savings game, currently mobile-only. Lobbies of players commit to weekly savings targets that escalate 2% per week. Hit the target, you survive. Miss it, you use a lifeline. Run out of lifelines, you're eliminated. The last player standing wins the prize pool — funded by EKKO's own subscription revenue, not by other players' losses. EKKO retains zero from the prize pool. Coming to web later.
Is this gambling?+
No. The prize pool is funded by EKKO's subscription revenue ($10 of every $20 Gold subscription), not by players' deposits. No one loses money they put in. The game is a behavioural mechanism to make saving stick — structurally it's a savings game with a prize pool, not a betting game. We have legal opinion on this, and the structure is reviewed pre-launch with the DIA.
Who built this?+
Tyson Harding. Solo Māori founder, Immiscible Tech Limited. Built EKKO because the manual version (just save with your family, write it on a whiteboard) does not work — the spreadsheet always fades, the conversations stop, the goal slips. EKKO is the structure that makes the kaupapa actually happen.
Nau mai, haere mai.
Free forever. No card required. Plan with the people you actually love.
Built by Tyson Harding · Immiscible Tech Limited · Auckland, Aotearoa