u/Ok_Shift4395

My friend and I have spent the last 18 months building BudgetGo.

At first, we thought we were building a simple budgeting app. Something to help people track expenses, manage their money, and understand where their income was going.

But the more we built, the more we realized that budgeting is not simple at all.

It is not just about adding transactions, showing charts, or putting spending into categories. People do not just want to track their money. They want to feel like they actually have control over it.

That realization changed how we think about the product.

We started BudgetGo as a small project, but now we want it to become a much better personal finance experience. Not just another expense tracker, but something that helps people understand their habits, spot where their money is going, and make better decisions without feeling overwhelmed.

The app is still early. It has rough edges. There are things we know we need to improve, and probably many things we have not even noticed yet.

That is why I’m posting here.

We are looking for people to test BudgetGo and give brutally honest feedback.

Tell us what feels confusing. Tell us what is missing. Tell us what you would never use. Tell us what would actually make you come back to a budgeting app consistently.

We are not looking for compliments. We are looking for real feedback so we can find the problems worth solving and make the product better.

BudgetGo: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/budgetgo-track-budget/id6761938917

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to try it or share feedback.

My friend and I have been building a personal finance app for nearly 18 months now. When we started, it was meant to be a “simple budgeting app,” but one thing I’ve learned is that there is almost no such thing as a simple app.

We’ve gone through multiple design iterations, rebuilt parts of the product several times, and are probably about to go through another iteration because we still feel there is more value we can provide. Around the same time we started, AI coding tools and “vibe coding” became popular, but even with tools like Claude Code and Codex, building a real product has still been extremely difficult.

There are so many edge cases the models do not think about, and honestly, so many things we did not think about either. I even lost around $500 because of a bug at one point, but that is probably a separate story.

After a long period of feature creep, we finally managed to stop adding new features and actually release the product. But now it feels like the real challenge has started: distribution.

Right now, we are trying a few things:

Posting on Instagram and TikTok
Talking to friends and family
Posting on X, although it feels very saturated with AI/coding/startup content

For people who have already launched an app or app-based business, how did you get your first real users?

Did you rely mostly on organic content, paid ads, communities, direct outreach, UGC creators, or something else?

We are trying to figure out whether paid ads are worth testing at this stage, or whether we should first focus more on UGC-style content and organic distribution.

Would really appreciate hearing what worked for others, especially in the early stage before having much traction.

My friend and I spent 18 months building a budgeting app. Now we need people to tear it apart.

How did you get your first users after launching?