Built for nonprofits, by someone who does the work

Grantary was built in San Diego, California, by me, Michael, with help from a few friends.

Since 2013 I’ve worked for a number of nonprofits, spending most of that time in grants and fundraising operations. I started as a grants associate, moved up to grants manager, and now lead fundraising as a senior director. I’ve helped a national grants team improve the systems behind their work, from training and writing applications to tracking the data that holds it all together. I’ve also seen this work from both sides: the one that writes the grant, and the one that has to monitor spend-down and reconcile every payment.

Everywhere I went, I saw the same gap. Grants were tracked in a spreadsheet, tracked nowhere at all, or run through a platform costing thousands a year that the organization couldn’t really afford or hadn’t fully optimized. On their own, those expensive tools rarely helped. Some were all flash and no substance, promising endless prospects and AI-written applications. Others were so technical and cumbersome you could hardly imagine getting started.

But the tools were only half of it. What really stayed with me was how much of grant work lived in someone’s head — where the money was, what had been promised, what was coming due next month. It usually went smoothly. But it ran on one person remembering, and that’s a lot to keep in your head alone.

So I built Grantary.

Most grant platforms fall into one of two traps. They’re expensive, clunky tools built for enterprise teams, or they’re chasing headlines about AI while the fundamentals get left half-built: easy-to-use interface, comprehensive tracking, on demand reporting, and all the compliance details.

Grantary does one thing, and does it well: giving your team a genuinely easy and affordable way to track and report on your grants, so you can spend less time managing the tool, and more time supporting your mission.

Grantary is my product, built and supported by me. I actively work in nonprofit grants and use this platform to support that work. When you email support, you get me, someone who knows what a reporting deadline feels like from the inside.

That comes with a trade-off worth naming: I’m one person, not a company with a support rota. What you get in exchange is a straight answer from someone who understands the question, and a product that answers to the people using it rather than to investors.