Home Getting Started Getting started with Orange Way

Getting started with Orange Way

Last updated on May 16, 2026

Getting started with Orange Way

Family budgeting on Bitcoin. Privacy by default, household-friendly by design. This walks you through signing up, unlocking your vault, and seeing your first connected account.

What Orange Way is for

Orange Way is a household budgeting app that runs on Bitcoin instead of a bank. Two parents (or roommates, or a couple, or anyone sharing money) can:

  • See a combined household balance without either party exposing their wallets to a third party.
  • Set monthly goals — savings, bills, restaurant spending, kids' allowance — and watch them tick down.
  • Bring in an accountant or auditor with read-only access without giving up your keys.
  • Stay private. Orange Way cannot see your transactions, balances, or counterparties. Same architectural reason as a password manager: ciphertext at rest, decryption in your browser.

Sign up

  1. Go to orangeway.app and click Sign up.
  2. Use the email you'd like associated with your account. Email confirmation lands in your inbox within ~30 seconds.
  3. Pick a vault password. This is the root of your account's privacy. We cannot reset it. Write it down somewhere safe, or save the Shamir recovery share (2 of 3) the app generates at vault setup. Without one of these, your data is unrecoverable.

That's the entire signup. No phone number, no SSN, no bank login.

Unlock your vault

Every time you open Orange Way, you'll enter your vault password. The app derives an encryption key from it (Argon2id, takes about one second on a modern phone or laptop) and unlocks everything in the browser. The key never leaves your device.

If you've enabled biometric quick-unlock on your phone, the vault password still applies behind the scenes — biometrics just authorize the app to use the key it already derived on first sign-in.

Set up your household

In Settings → Household, invite a partner by email. They sign up the same way, and you link the two accounts with a one-time household key exchange (it takes about three taps). After that, every transaction either of you records, every connected wallet, and every monthly goal is shared between you — but only between you. Orange Way still sees ciphertext.

Add more members for kids (read-only mode is the default for sub-accounts under 18), an accountant (see "Bring in an auditor or accountant"), or a roommate.

Connect a wallet

Orange Way talks to Bitcoin wallets, exchanges, and payment processors through Orange Rails, the open-source connector platform. Click Add a connection in the dashboard, pick your wallet from the catalog of 100+ supported sources, and either:

  • Paste an API key (for exchanges and payment processors), or
  • Paste a watch-only xpub (for on-chain Bitcoin wallets like Sparrow, Specter, Ledger, BlueWallet, etc.)

The Connect widget encrypts your credential in your browser before it reaches Orange Way. Even Orange Rails — the connector — only sees the bytes needed to call the upstream wallet. Full breakdown of the privacy model: Privacy and what we cannot see.

See your first transactions

Once a wallet is connected, click Sync now (or wait — Orange Way syncs in the background every hour). Transactions appear in your dashboard, categorized by your household rules, and folded into your monthly goal progress.

The first sync of a long-history xpub can take ~30 seconds while the browser scans BIP 158 filter files. Subsequent syncs are quick because each one only checks new blocks.

What's next

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