Building in public usually means posting the good days. A screenshot when the design lands, a number when the number is up, silence for the fortnight in between. It is not dishonest exactly, but the picture it leaves is not the one the person building it has.
The version being attempted here is duller and more useful: the roadmap is kept accurate rather than flattering, and where something is not built the site says so in the present tense rather than describing it as though it were.
Why this is genuinely difficult
Marketing copy drifts toward the future tense on its own. A feature that is designed, specified and half-built feels done to the person who has been living in it for a month, and it takes deliberate effort to keep writing about it in the tense it actually occupies. The pressure is not from dishonesty; it is from proximity.
So the check is procedural rather than a matter of good intentions. Every public claim on this site has to be one a visitor could verify the day they read it. A number is on the page because it is checkable, not because it is impressive — and a pre-launch product has no customers, so it gets no logo wall, no user count and no testimonials.
What that looks like in practice
The roadmap runs ten phases and each one carries one of four words: Done, In progress, Coming soon, TBA. There are no dates on it. A roadmap that commits to a date is a roadmap that is wrong later, and the correction never travels as far as the promise did.
Right now the web app exists: you can create a ledger, record income and expenses and group them, import a bank statement, and have a receipt read for you and handed back as an entry to confirm. The agent, the desktop app and the phone app are not built, and the roadmap says so rather than hedging.
The point of doing it this way
A product asking you to trust it with your financial records does not get to be loose about what is true. If the roadmap overstates what exists, there is no reason to believe the privacy page either — they are claims of the same kind, made by the same person, and one of them is easy to check.
So the roadmap is the cheap, visible test of whether the expensive, invisible claims are worth anything.