AITA for refusing to pay for my daughter's college with money from a side gig?
My daughter Emma (17F) has always been very advanced in math/science. Around 13 she taught herself programming and built a niche app that became pretty successful. The app is free but has optional paid features that bring in good money.
Since she was a minor, everything had to be under my name: developer accounts, app store publishing, bank account, cloud hosting, etc. I also handled taxes and paid income taxes on the revenue every year.
Emma did the coding, but I handled the legal/financial side and paid the operating costs. She’s leaving for college soon, and I figured this was the natural point for her to start fresh with her own accounts and future projects. I was planning to keep the current app and try to grow it further.
I’ve spoken with a consultant who thinks the app has serious potential and already has a growth plan for it, including agent integrations and scaling the business side. He says a lot of the maintenance and development can be automated now anyway, so it’s not entirely dependent on Emma continuing to manually work on it herself. He’d help manage growth for a commission.
The problem is Emma apparently assumed the app revenue would become her college fund. I told her no because I want to reinvest the money into growing the app instead.
She got furious and accused me of stealing her work. I understand she built the original app, but I’m the one who handled the accounts, taxes, liability, payments, hosting, and everything required to actually run it commercially for years.
Things got heated enough that I changed the passwords because I didn’t trust her not to do something impulsive like lock me out or interfere with the accounts.