New startup ideas · Direct giving, without the middlemen · The 2026 deduction as a product
startup concept
Givetally
Tracks a household's $1,000 charitable deduction and builds the proof automatically
A consumer app that connects bank and card accounts, identifies cash gifts to qualifying charities, keeps a running total toward the $1,000 single and $2,000 joint cap, and stores the contemporaneous written acknowledgment each gift needs under IRC 170(f)(8).
- Software subscription
- Consumer
- Universal charitable deduction from 2026
7
similar startups, last 2 years (33 all-time)
yes
8 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$900 · 3 weeks · 30 prospects
For $900 and three weeks, prove that standard-deduction givers will pay $19 up front for 2026 deduction tracking they expect nobody to do free, measured by 25 paid pre-orders and three distribution commitments.
Riskiest assumption · A standard-deduction giver will pay for deduction tracking in 2026 rather than do nothing and wait for TurboTax or their bank to add charitable-gift tagging as a free feature.
1Focus group: who and where
A household that takes the standard deduction and gives $50-200 a month to a church or school by card or bank transfer, keeps no acknowledgment letters, and has just learned the first $1,000 ($2,000 joint) of 2026 cash gifts is deductible if the paper trail exists.
where to find 30 · Threads on the new 2026 charitable deduction in r/personalfinance and r/DaveRamsey, where monthly givers already ask how to claim it (community); the waitlist and interview pool generated by Meta ads targeted to charitable-giving and church-attendance interests (channel and list); for the distribution wedge, National Association of Tax Professionals local chapter meetings and r/taxpros, where preparers serving standard-deduction clients gather (channel).
2Sell first, build later
A founding pre-order for tax year 2026: the app launches October 1, 2026, connects bank and card accounts, imports gifts back to January 1, verifies each charity against Pub78 and state registries, tracks the running total against the $1,000/$2,000 cap, and exports one substantiation package before the 2027 filing season.
the ask · $19 one-time for tax year 2026 (founding price, versus $29 at launch)
a real yes · A real yes is a completed $19 checkout with a card charged; email signups, survey answers about willingness to pay, and upvotes on a Reddit thread are not yeses
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Priced pre-order landing test
$600 · 14 days
Put up a one-page site with the $19 founding pre-order and an October 1, 2026 launch date, and buy $500 of Meta ads targeted to charitable-giving and church-attendance interests. Every visitor sees the price before the checkout; no free waitlist option. Founder watches visitor, checkout-start and payment counts daily.
keep going if · From 500 visitors, at least 3% pay: 15 or more $19 pre-orders, with checkout starts above 6%
2. Giver interviews
$200 · 10 days
Book 15 paid 20-minute calls with monthly givers recruited from the ad respondents and from 2026-deduction threads in r/personalfinance and r/DaveRamsey, at $20 per call. Ask how they track gifts today, whether they hold any acknowledgment letters, and what they expect their bank or TurboTax to do for free.
keep going if · 10 of 15 keep no acknowledgment letters today and intend to claim the deduction; fewer than 5 say they will wait for TurboTax to add it free
3. Preparer channel test
$100 · 10 days
Hold 10 conversations with enrolled agents and independent preparers found through NATP chapter meetings and r/taxpros. Offer a co-branded tracker they hand to standard-deduction clients this fall so those clients arrive in 2027 with a clean substantiation package. Ask for a written commitment to distribute to at least 50 clients.
keep going if · 3 of 10 commit in writing to distribute to 50 or more clients each
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$19
per prospect, refundable
how · A consumer pre-order with a delivery date, taken as a $19 card payment at checkout on the landing page; at this price and for this buyer a card checkout is the only credible instrument, since no consumer signs an LOI for a $19 app, and the payment itself is the measurement set up: Stripe Checkout ↗
what it reserves · A founding spot at the locked $19 price for tax year 2026, gift import back to January 1, 2026, and the substantiation export before filing season opens
refund · Refunded in full with one click any time before the substantiation export ships in January 2027.
target · 25 paid pre-orders from roughly 500 landing visitors within 21 days
before taking money · Marketing must not promise a specific tax outcome or offer personalized tax advice, and every deduction-eligibility claim should be reviewed by a tax professional before the page goes live.
Go: build it if
25 or more paid pre-orders at a 3%-plus visitor-to-payment rate within 21 days, plus 3 of 10 preparers committing in writing to distribute - build, and launch by October 1, 2026 so the 2026 tax year is still capturable
Kill: stop if
Fewer than 8 pre-orders from 500 visitors, or interviews showing most givers will wait for TurboTax or their bank to add tagging free - the stated risk confirmed, stop before writing the classifier
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
You give every month and take the standard deduction, so until now none of it counted at tax time. Starting with tax year 2026, the first $1,000 ($2,000 filing jointly) of cash gifts is deductible, but only with records the IRS accepts, and most givers keep none. I am building Givetally to track that automatically from your bank feed, and I am paying $20 for 20-minute calls with monthly givers this week. Can I book you?
landing page
Your 2026 charitable deduction, tracked and proven automatically $19 founding pre-order: every 2026 gift found, verified, totaled, and exported for filing season Pre-order for $19, refundable until your export ships
deposit terms
Your $19 pre-order locks the founding price for tax year 2026 (regular price $29) and reserves your spot for the October 1, 2026 launch, with gift import back to January 1, 2026 and your substantiation export delivered before filing season. Full refund with one click any time before your export ships in January 2027.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.
53
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 32.4 x 1.64
Active
competition: more crowded than 69% of ideas · headwind x0.65
+3.4
government priorities, secondary (19 matching grants)
Trend
46
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)55
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector33
- Sector direction (live batch)50
Demand
65
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
100x potential
29
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Neighbours still alive29
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were tracks, household, 000, charitable, deduction, builds, proof, automatically.
The concept in full
- What
- A consumer app that connects bank and card accounts, identifies cash gifts to qualifying charities, keeps a running total toward the $1,000 single and $2,000 joint cap, and stores the contemporaneous written acknowledgment each gift needs under IRC 170(f)(8). It stops fraud before money moves: before a first or recurring gift it checks the charity's IRS status, state regulator standing, filing history and website domain age, and warns when a gift will not qualify, such as a crowdfunding gift to an individual or the tip on top of it. At filing time it exports one substantiation package to tax software.
- Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
- The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, lets standard-deduction filers, about 86% of taxpayers in 2026, deduct up to $1,000 of cash gifts ($2,000 joint) from tax year 2026; Tax Foundation scores the non-itemizer deduction at $74 billion over 2025-2034. GoFundMe's December 9, 2025 report counts 80 million donations, 47 million to individual fundraisers that do not qualify, which is exactly the confusion this product resolves. FBI IC3 (January 16, 2025) counts $96 million lost to fake charities in 2024.
- What it rides
- Universal charitable deduction from 2026: 86% of filers have never itemized, so none of them have ever kept charitable substantiation, and this product is the substantiation layer they are missing.
- Why now
- Tax year 2026 is the first year the deduction exists and its first filing season opens in early 2027; the app has to be recording gifts now, in 2026, for the deduction to be claimable then, and 86% of filers are starting from zero on recordkeeping.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- Standard-deduction filers who give small recurring gifts to church and school; distribution through one regional tax-prep chain or credit union that wants a 2026-gift tracker to hand members before the 2027 filing season. A 1-3 person team ships a transaction classifier plus IRS Publication 78 and state registry lookups.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- Magnetic (yc S25) is an AI tax preparer for CPA firms, not a donor-facing tracker; no consumer deduction tracker is tracked in the 2025-2026 cohorts.
- Main risk
- TurboTax or the banks add charitable-gift tagging as a free feature and the standalone app never earns its subscription.
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Public money in this direction
US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
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- KindsigScreens volunteer and goods appeals before your congregation responds
Fictional concept generated 2026-08-26 by claude-fable-5 from the collection's brief and MarkosWeb data. Treat it as a research prompt, not a plan.