How Alby Runs Its Business Income and Expenses on Bitcoin with Alby Hub

Running a business on bitcoin

Running a business on bitcoin is often described as complicated. In practice, the complexity usually comes from tooling, not from bitcoin itself. When your payment rails, your budgets, and your bookkeeping live in separate silos, even a healthy cash flow turns into an administrative burden.

At Alby, we run our own day-to-day operations on bitcoin, and we do it with Alby Hub. Income arrives over the Lightning Network, expenses go out the same way, and the records that feed our accounting are generated as the money moves. This two-part series walks through exactly how we use the product internally, so you can see what a bitcoin-native business workflow looks like and decide what would work for yours.

Part 1 covers the financial foundation: structuring income, managing expenses, and keeping clean books. Part 2 moves into automation, including AI agents and Lightning node management.

Structuring Our Income Streams

Why it matters

Most businesses do not earn revenue in a single, uniform way, and bitcoin businesses are no exception. You might have predictable recurring revenue alongside a long tail of small, irregular payments. If all of that lands in one undifferentiated pool, you lose visibility into where your money actually comes from, and reconciliation becomes guesswork. Separating income streams up front gives you cleaner reporting, clearer performance insights, and a treasury you can actually reason about.

How we structure income at Alby

We use Alby Hub to capture the full range of inflows a modern bitcoin business sees:

• Recurring bitcoin payments from subscriptions and ongoing services

• One-time payments for individual products or invoices

• Zaps from the social and Nostr ecosystem

• Donations from supporters

• Value-for-value (V4V) payments tied to the content and tools we ship

Rather than funnel all of this into one balance, we route different streams where they belong so each one stays measurable.

The features that make it work

Two Alby Hub features carry most of the weight here. Sub-wallets let us create dedicated balances for distinct purposes, so a donation stream and a subscription stream never get tangled together. Lightning addresses give each of those wallets a simple, human-readable payment destination that we can hand out publicly or attach to a specific campaign. Together they turn a single node into an organized set of clearly labeled income channels.

Expense Management

Why it matters

Income gets the attention, but outflows are where control is won or lost. Recurring vendor payments, infrastructure costs, and discretionary spending all need limits, or a single misconfigured integration can quietly drain a wallet. Staying in control of outflows is about predictability as much as security: you want to know what will be spent, by whom, and when.

How we manage expenses at Alby

A concrete example: we pay for our VPS hosting in bitcoin. Instead of approving each payment manually or handing over unrestricted access, we set up a custom allowance that renews monthly. The hosting provider gets paid automatically within that ceiling, and the budget resets on schedule, so the cost stays bounded and entirely visible.

The features that make it work

This setup relies on a few capabilities working together. App connections let us authorize a specific service to pull payments without exposing the whole wallet. Sub-wallets with custom budget management let us define an individual budget amount and a renewal date for each connection, so every spending relationship has its own guardrails. And linked payment cards with automated top-ups extend the same control to everyday card spending, keeping funded balances topped up to a defined level rather than left open-ended. The result is spending that runs on autopilot but never outside the lines you set.

Streamline Bookkeeping and Accounting

Why it matters

Bitcoin payments are private and flexible by design, which is a strength for operations but a challenge for accounting. A handful of large transactions is easy to track. Hundreds or thousands of small ones, with no built-in context about what each was for, quickly becomes unmanageable. Clean, structured records are what make accurate bookkeeping, tax reporting, and financial analysis possible at all.

How we streamline accounting at Alby

We solve this with transaction labeling in Alby Hub. Instead of reconstructing context after the fact, we attach the relevant information to each transaction the moment it happens, and we align those labels directly with how our books are structured in QuickBooks. Each transaction gets tagged with its type (expense, transfer, or sales receipt), the matching account from our chart of accounts, the counterparty mapped to a vendor or customer, and a short memo capturing the period, invoice number, or purpose. By the time we close out a bookkeeping cycle, the categorization is already done.

The features that make it work

The two features behind this are transaction labeling and transaction exports. Consistent labels turn a raw list of payments into structured data, and exports turn that structured data into something your accounting system can import with minimal cleanup. For us, that has meant hours saved per cycle, far fewer errors, and financial records we can actually trust.

We Hope This Inspires You

This is how we keep our own bitcoin-related income organized, our spending controlled, and our books clean, entirely on bitcoin. None of it requires bending your business to fit a rigid tool; Alby Hub adapts to the way you already operate.

So we will ask you the same question we keep asking ourselves: what is still missing before Alby Hub becomes genuinely useful for your business? Tell us, and we will build it.

In Part 2, we move from managing money to automating it, with AI agents and hands-off Lightning node management.