About Payday Relay
A weekly finish line for people who work for themselves.
Payday Relay turns unstructured 1099 income into a repeatable rhythm. It was built for independent earners whose work has no paycheck, no clear stopping point, and no one above telling them when they've worked enough to cover all their bases.
Payday Relay gives that work a shape.
Built from lived experience
I built Payday Relay because I needed it.
I was diagnosed with inattentive-type ADD at 33, after decades of studying and working in systems that didn't work for me. So naturally, ADHD is part of Payday Relay's origin story. It's visual and gamified. Progress is immediate and easy to see, and big goals are broken into smaller manageable targets.
But you don't have to have ADHD to benefit from Payday Relay. One of its biggest rewards is the momentum that comes from building on your own progress, one week at a time.
Payday Relay was built for gig workers, freelancers, and independent service providers who have plenty of work available, but no reliable way to know when they've worked enough to cover not just their expenses, but taxes, savings goals, and a real vacation.
Or, put more simply: when they've earned enough to confidently stop for the day.
The founder
I’m Shari “Dove” Shepard.
I built Payday Relay after years of remote 1099 work where the freedom to work whenever I wanted came with a problem: I never knew when I’d done enough.
That became impossible to ignore after I moved to Mexico and suddenly had a very concrete income target to hit. I needed a way to turn a big number into something I could work toward today.
As Payday Relay’s first long-term user, I still run my own 52-week relay race on the same system my users get.
Ownership and Integrity
Payday Relay is a privacy-conscious, values-led tool built specifically for independent earners. We stick to clear pricing, plain language, and honest AI use, with absolutely no dark-pattern conversion tricks. Your numbers belong entirely to you. Your Google Sheet lives in your own Drive, and our system only accesses it to run the calculations, never to sell your data or turn your financial life into someone else’s asset.
Please note: Caddy, our in-app coach, is here to support reflection and clarity, but does not replace professional financial, legal, tax, or investment advice.
Long term, Payday Relay is building toward formal social and environmental accountability through paths like B Corp certification and 1% for the Planet.
For now, the pledge is simple:
- Build useful software.
- Respect people’s data.
- Support independent work.
- Grow responsibly.
Start Your Free 4-Relay Sprint
Run four weekly relays with your real numbers and your own Google Sheet.
See what changes when your workweek has a finish line.
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