I just ran some calculations and the website is tracking approximately $4,200,426,390.10 in transactions right now. The last time we checked (about 6 months ago) we were somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000,000.
The site has averaged over 8,000 new transactions made each day for the past week. That's a little over 5 new transactions each minute!
It's crazy to think that we're now getting as many transactions added each hour as we used to get in an entire week about a year ago. Keep spreading the word of the site to your friends and family so we can continue to grow and make the site better!
This little known feature has been around since about August and was developed specifically for a personal finance course at Purdue University. The Projects feature allows a group of people to manage their ClearCheckbook accounts as usual, but then adds a new kind of report to their navigation.
This new report allows you to view your spending in a set of specified categories with the rest of the group. This is a great way to see how your spending compares to those of your peers. You also don't have to worry about other group members seeing what you've spent your money on. All they can see are group averages compared to their own spending.
If you are interested in setting up a Project with ClearCheckbook, please use the Contact form at the bottom of any page and let us know. This feature is completely free to use and all we need to know is what you would like your project code to be (all users will enter this code when they register) and what categories you would like the project to track.
Since the Project feature is still relatively new and tailored mainly for the needs of one personal finance course, we'd be glad to hear what your opinions are on how we could expand the Projects section to make it even better.
If you're interested in learning more about the Project feature or if you want to give some suggetsions on additions to make to it, please let us know!
With the traffic to ClearCheckbook more than tripling in four months, our server has really been put to the test... and it hasn't been doing so well. The release of V2 and the additional traffic it has brought has just about pushed our existing server over the edge and into unstable territory.
Because we want ClearCheckbook to be as fast as possible, we've decided to finally upgrade to a real server that will be able to serve our needs for years to come. With that being said, I would like to thank all of you who have donated to ClearCheckbook since we started taking donations almost exactly a year ago. To date, we have received almost $1,000 in donations ranging from a few dollars all the way up to $50 a piece.
We've taken that money and purchased a new server with two Quad Core 1.60Ghz processors, 4 GB of RAM and dual 80 Gig hard drives (We're calling the server DocOck). The server itself cost just over $2,000 and should be arriving in our hands this Friday (tomorrow). Now that we will finally have a really sweet and powerful server, we also need to upgrade our hosting to accommodate it. With the new hosting provider, we're looking at a yearly fee of around $1,200 simply to host the website.
If you have been thinking about sending in a donation, it would be great if you did in the next couple of weeks. Every little bit we have helps. For now, with the remainder of the server cost and the hosting fees for the year, we're going to be paying about $2,200 out of our pockets.
Don't worry though, even if we don't get enough donations to cover the additional costs, the site isn't going anywhere. It just helps us out a little more if we have some additional money to pay for upgrades, etc.
We're probably going to be switching to the new server some time the week of November 12. We'll post more details when the time comes.
Well, it appears that for some reason CheckBot's account was suspended by AOL for some unknown TOS violation.
While we work on getting the original name back, we unfortunately needed to change the screen name to "clearcheckbot" in the mean time. This means you'll need to update your buddy lists and text messages to point to that instead of "clearcheckbook".
Sorry for the inconvenience. We're working on fixing the issue.
Yes, that's right. ClearCheckbook has now passed the 1 Million transaction point and has over 10,000 active users. This is a great milestone for the site and I would like to say thanks for everyone who uses the site daily and helps spread the word of the site to other people.
The 1,000,000th transaction and 10,000th active user marks were met within about 24 hours of each other, which is great!
V2 is still scheduled to be made live some time on Sunday Night. Again, the site and CheckBot will be taken offline for a little while so we can update the backed database without new information being written. We'll make the transition as quick as possible so you can start using the new version right away.
