Your employer set aside $24,000 for your family's health care. If you don't use it, we help you get paid for it.
← Back to Build HQIt's halftime of an away Bills game. A young couple in Akron, two kids, open enrollment packets spread across the kitchen table. They're living on what was once the family farm. She went to UB. He went to Canisius.
She drives into the city every morning to work at M&T. He drives in to Rich Products. They're each making around $80,000. Good solid jobs. Real health benefits.
Their family only needs one plan.
Above each of them, floating right there at the kitchen table, is a balloon. Her employer has allocated $24,000 this year to cover her family. His employer has done the same. That money is part of their compensation. They earned it. It was set aside specifically for them.
Today she pops the balloon. With CouplesBenefits, she catches the money inside it.
Right now, that $24,000 vanishes. Not spent on care. Not returned to them. Just gone. The couple did nothing wrong. They just picked a plan, like they do every October, and the other allocation disappeared.
What if instead of losing that money, you got paid for not using it?
That's what we're building. CouplesBenefits sits between the two employers and turns that vanishing allocation into a monthly opt-out payment to the household. The Millers keep one great plan, and the employer who's no longer covering them pays them for stepping aside.
That couple at the kitchen table? That was me and my wife in 2013. We gave up about $10,000 that year because we couldn't figure out how to coordinate two employer plans, and nobody had built the tool. I bought the domain that weekend.
But I'd been watching this problem from the other side of the table for years before that. I owned bakeries. Health care was one of the hardest parts of keeping good people. I was writing premium checks I couldn't really afford, while some of my best employees had solid coverage available through their spouses, and no way to capture the value of not using mine. Money evaporating on both sides of the same transaction.
So why now, after over a decade?
Two things changed. Health care costs have compounded at 6% a year for three straight years. The wasted allocation per household crossed from "annoying" to "impossible to ignore." At the same time, the cost of building software collapsed. What used to require a team of fifteen takes a team of two. A problem that used to get built in San Francisco or not at all can now get built in Buffalo by people who actually know the employers.
The Millers are not alone. There are roughly 30 million dual-earner married couples in the US with overlapping employer benefits. Every October at open enrollment, every one of them has the opportunity to revisit this decision. Most get it wrong, because the math is hard, nobody's coordinating between the two employers, and nobody is rooting for the household.
We're rooting for the household.
Say Rich Products has set their opt-out at up to $1,000/month for employees whose spouse carries qualifying family coverage. M&T's plan qualifies. Here's what happens:
Rich Products was going to spend $24,000 this year on his coverage anyway. Now they're spending $12,360 and keeping an employee who feels taken care of. The Millers pick up $11,160 a year they were leaving on the table. M&T changes nothing.
"The Millers shouldn't have to choose between a Bills game and a spreadsheet. We do the spreadsheet for them."
The reason this works is the position we hold. CouplesBenefits sits between the two employers. Neither one sees the other's full hand. Neither one knows whether this particular employee was going to take their coverage or walk away from it.
That matters. If the employer knew the employee was definitely opting out, the incentive to offer a generous payment drops to zero. Why pay someone for something they were going to do anyway?
But they don't know. And because we're the ones facilitating the match, that uncertainty is preserved. Each employer sets their opt-out rules based on what the coverage is worth to them, not based on what they think the employee will do. The result is a fair price, set by the employer, delivered to the household.
No individual couple can create this dynamic on their own. They'd have to walk into HR and say "I'm thinking about opting out" — which immediately tells the employer they're leaving. The leverage disappears. We keep it intact.
A working demo with four screens, every one of them built around helping a real couple like the Millers:
HR sets their opt-out rules once. Maximum payment, coverage requirements, conditions. Five minutes of setup, then it applies to every qualifying employee automatically.
Both spouses enter their employer and plan info. Quick and minimal. They shouldn't need a benefits lawyer to use this.
Both employers' rules compared. Overlap found. The deal and the dollars the household just captured, right on screen. This is the moment the Millers lean forward.
Aggregate savings across participating employees. How a CFO sees real money saved, every month, compounding.