Built for everyone with variable income.
Night Shift is for everyone with variable income — tips, deposits, gigs, or all three — and who wants what payroll quietly gives salaried workers: a clear number for what they earned, a tax bill that doesn't blindside, and a balance growing in the background.
Family & Friends · Pre-Seed opening soon.
Whether you have a salary or not, you still deserve financial predictability and stability.
The principle
Night Shift is for everyone with variable income — tips, deposits, gigs, or all three — and who wants what payroll quietly gives salaried workers. Top 3 features: a clear earnings number, a tax bill that doesn't blindside, a balance growing in the background. ~65M US TAM.
Whether you have a salary or not, you still deserve financial predictability and stability. The personal-finance category was built for the W-2 paycheck. Night Shift was built for everyone else.
Night Shift automatically handles variable income the way payroll quietly handles salaries. A shift logs in five seconds; the tax reserve fills first; the rest auto-splits into jars. What payroll quietly does for salaries — done for everyone else.
What Night Shift gives you
The Top 3 features — the math Reddit DIYs in a Google Sheet, on your home screen.
A clear number for what you earned.
Net-after-tax, net-after-gas, net-after-tip-out. The real $/hour, per shift, per source. The Pay-Yourself Ratio on the home screen turns “where did it all go” into a single number you can run against the month.
A tax bill that doesn't blindside.
A reserve fills before the worker decides to save. Transparent state + city breakdown — $847 = $721 federal + $79 CA + $47 SF. On $54K net, the effective federal bill is ~$11K. April panic, retired.
A balance growing in the background.
Jars for slow season, rent, goals. Recurring goals that survive the slow weeks. Bills tracked in the same surface. Per-source attribution shows what each gig actually pays after costs. Banking optional via Stripe Financial Connections, never required.
Why now
Mint sunset in 2024, publicly citing inability to serve non-traditional earners — the largest horizontal PFM left the table. Stripe Financial Connections went GA — one Stripe relationship handles subscriptions + bank linking; competitors still on Plaid carry two-vendor compliance burden. The tipped-worker squeeze: minimum wage rising in DC, Chicago, and seven states while bar-pour tip averages structurally fall from 12–14% to 10–12% (r/bartenders 2025) — the squeeze is the market. AI labor costs collapsed: a solo, full-stack, full-time operator now ships at the pace a 3-person team did in 2022; engineering moved from largest line item to ~2% of fundraise. The category window opened in 2024 and is open now.
Why Night Shift wins
Volatility is the baseline.
Mint, Monarch, YNAB assume monthly stability and require a bank link. Night Shift assumes multi-source variability and treats banking as optional, never required.
365 days vs 1 day.
Hurdlr, Keeper Tax, Stride show up at filing season and disappear. Night Shift's tax balance updates per shift. Engagement loop, not seasonality.
Six verticals, one architecture.
Rideshare, FOH, BOH, salon, dancers, delivery — each speaks its own vocabulary, routed at the subdomain layer. Generic gig tools cannot replicate this without rebuilding.
The market
~60–70M variable-income Americans — bartenders, drivers, dancers, stylists, salon workers, freelancers, and the hybrid W-2 + 1099 cohort — run their finances in spreadsheets and screenshots. The personal-finance category was built for the W-2 paycheck. The category gap between bank aggregators (link required, salary-defaulted) and filing-altitude tax tools (once-a-year) has been open since Mint sunset. No daily-ritual product owns this segment. $9B subscription TAM at $150/yr list, before B2B seats, transactional revenue, and data licensing.
Founder
Cruz Romero Morales — Founder & Operator.
Cruz worked back-of-house restaurant kitchens, rideshare, and delivery through college and after — the kind of jobs where your paycheck doesn’t fit on a paystub. He built Night Shift because the tools for that workforce are spreadsheets and screenshots.
V1 is live on Stripe today, built and run solo. Spanish parity since day one, because the largest segment of US service workers speaks Spanish on shift — and English-only competitors leave them out.
BOH and rideshare-delivery vocabulary is in his own words. FOH, salon, and dancer vocabularies were validated through direct user research — every vertical Night Shift speaks, it speaks accurately.
“I’m building the product I needed when I started, with the discipline I have now.”
Carleton College · The Resurrection Project · UW–Madison
The ask
$500K on a $5M post-money MFN SAFE. YC standard template. 10% equity at cap. $25K minimum check. No discount; no pro rata in the standard template.
Stage: Family & Friends in progress. Pre-Seed opening soon; close dates set when Pre-Seed opens (per ADR 031).
What this capital buys: 18–24 months of runway carrying Night Shift through the Series Seed trigger — $1M ARR floor, V2 Waves 2–3 shipped, SOC 2 Type II in hand. The pre-seed dollar’s job is to put us in the room for Series Seed, with proof.
Night Shift is live at nightshift.cash.
V1 is in production on Stripe today. V2 ships Q3 2026. The deck is one form away.