A pretend bank for your family, class or club.
Invent a currency. Give people accounts. Pay them, charge them, set an interest rate and watch it compound. Everything works like a real bank, and none of it is real money.
Still being built. VirtuBank is not open yet. Have a look at what it does, and join the group to hear when it opens.
Nothing to install. It will work on a phone or a laptop.
Families
Pocket money that shows up on a phone, with interest that makes saving visible.
Classrooms
A class currency for good work, spent on things you decide are worth having.
Clubs
Merits for turning up, helping out or hitting a goal, and a list of things members can spend them on.
Shops
A loyalty programme you can try out properly before building a real one.
How it works
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Make your currency
Use dollars, or invent Merits, Gold Coins or House Points. Pick a symbol and decide whether it expires.
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Invite people
Send a link. Everyone gets an account, and you decide what your staff are allowed to do.
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Run it
Pay, charge, set prices for things you sell, and let interest accrue. Every movement is recorded properly.
Clubs: your own merits, and something to spend them on
Invent a currency — Merits, Club Points, Paw Prints — and award it for whatever your club actually values. Turning up to training. Helping at the bake sale. Passing a badge. Bringing the nets in when nobody else volunteered.
Then list what members can redeem: a club hoodie, a guest pass, a go on the good kayak, first pick of the fixtures. Members see their balance and what it buys; you see who earned what, and every movement is recorded properly.
Merits can lapse at the end of a season or build up for years. That is your decision, not one made for you.
It behaves like the real thing
Every balance is backed by double-entry bookkeeping, so what somebody holds and what happened to it can never disagree. Interest compounds on a schedule you set. Points expire oldest-first, so nobody loses the ones they could have spent.
That matters because the point is learning how money actually works — and a simulation that quietly cheats teaches the wrong lesson.
Free, and staying free. Here is the catch.
VirtuBank costs nothing to use. Not “free for your first three members”, not “free until we count how many pupils you have”. There are no tiers, nothing is locked, and there is no upgrade button hiding behind the features you actually wanted.
The catch is me. I am one developer, with a family who are unreasonably attached to eating, and a hosting bill that turns up every month whether anybody signed in or not. The servers are entirely unmoved by the fact that the money inside VirtuBank is pretend. They want the other kind.
So if this is useful to you, you can chip in. If it is not, please do not — go and use it for free, that is the whole idea.
Donating unlocks absolutely nothing. No badge, no priority, no secret features, no higher limits. Everyone gets the same VirtuBank, which is the point — you would only be making next month’s bill less alarming. Reporting a bug is worth just as much, and is cheaper.
Not quite ready yet.
VirtuBank is still being built. Join the group and I will say when it is open.
Tell me when it opens