Our Story

It all began in the fall of 2003 from an idea spawned by selling vintage board games on EBAY. Many of the games we found at estate sales and garage sales were incomplete, many times not having the full set of money originally distributed with the game. We occasionally found sets that had photocopies of US Bills reduced to the size of the game bills. We even crossed home grown attempts to hand draw bills and cut and tape images on them. Then it dawned on us - - why not allow individuals to create their own money on the web, as they desire?

We started selling custom game money in the late winter of 2003 by listing auctions on EBAY. The winner of the auction had to email their picture and verbally describe the layout they desired. In 2004 we produced our first web site 'mygamemoney.com' allowing you, the customer, to customize your money in a "wizard" like fashion. It started slow, but then we placed a google adwords ad and within 5 minutes our first fortune 500 company order was placed. After several iterations of marketing ideas, the site domain turned to 'customplaymoney.com' sometime in 2006.

Over the next 3 years we talked to thousands of customers who all had unique uses for their play money. Everyone wanted more features/flexibility in the bill design wizard, and we took carefull notes of their requests. In 2009 we created the vision for the ultimate play money site, and began the long journey to implement it to reality. It tooks months of brainstorming to settle on the 'Spendus.com' name, and develop our character Spendacus.

Finally, in 2010 we rolled out our site to the delight of our customers. We expanded from just offering one sided play money bills with basic options to offering two sided bills, coupons, wooden nickels, credit cards, scratch offs, and checks. We added every enhancement imagined by our customers, and a complete product line of play money related items.

We are a small home based business located in Schenectady, NY. by a husband and wife team, along with our two dogs. I (the husband) still hold a full time job as a web developer for the Health Care industry, and my wife works as a business analyst. The business now consumes most of our 1,000 s/f basement, paper storage alone consumes an entire room. The rest of the space is dedicated to slicers, printers, laminators, perferator, sorters, computers and other misc machines. Our product offering list is growing, but my wife tells me we need to keep the inventory out of the kitchen. Our detached garage is fair game in my opinion.

Thanks for taking the time to check us out, and we are here to serve your play money needs.

Sincerely,
Brian & Crystal