u/Stycroft

I've tried every budgeting app. Even, the fancy ones with the nice charts, all of them. After some time I quit every single one for the same reason: I'm too lazy to log every transaction, it's too tedious for me and I don't actually care where every single dollar went. I only care about my net worth, like am I ahead or behind on my goals? and what should I do next.

So for the past year I've done something dumb-simple instead. Once a month I open an AI chat, paste in my account balances (bank, stocks, crypto), and ask: am I on track for my goals, and what's the single best move right now? No categories, no receipts. And it's worked better than any app I've used.

The problem is the chat has no memory. It forgets my goals, it can't project when I'll actually hit them, and it never keeps score on whether the move it gave me last month actually worked. Every session starts from zero.

So I'm building the app version of my own workflow:

• Add your accounts, set a goal (house, $1M, a year of runway). You update your totals now and then, and it projects when you'll actually hit each one based on your real saving pace.
• Every check-in it tells you what changed, whether you're ahead or behind, and the one move that helps most.
• You can pull any group of accounts into a chat to strategize ("is my crypto too heavy?").
• It remembers every decision and shows whether it actually grew your money.
• Everything stays on your phone.

I already do the manual version in Claude though it's kinda disorganized, so my honest question: would you actually use a dedicated app for this? And if you'd use it, what would make it worth switching? Brutal feedback welcome.

I've tried every budgeting app. Even, the fancy ones with the nice charts, all of them. After some time I quit every single one for the same reason: I'm too lazy to log every transaction, it's too tedious for me and I don't actually care where every single dollar went. I only care about my net worth, like am I ahead or behind on my goals? and what should I do next.

So for the past year I've done something dumb-simple instead. Once a month I open an AI chat, paste in my account balances (bank, stocks, crypto), and ask: am I on track for my goals, and what's the single best move right now? No categories, no receipts. And it's worked better than any app I've used.

The problem is the chat has no memory. It forgets my goals, it can't project when I'll actually hit them, and it never keeps score on whether the move it gave me last month actually worked. Every session starts from zero.

So I'm building the app version of my own workflow:

• Add your accounts, set a goal (house, $1M, a year of runway). You update your totals now and then, and it projects when you'll actually hit each one based on your real saving pace.
• Every check-in it tells you what changed, whether you're ahead or behind, and the one move that helps most.
• You can pull any group of accounts into a chat to strategize ("is my crypto too heavy?").
• It remembers every decision and shows whether it actually grew your money.
• Everything stays on your phone.

I already do the manual version in Claude though it's kinda disorganized, so my honest question: would you actually use a dedicated app for this? And if you'd use it, what would make it worth switching? Brutal feedback welcome.

https://preview.redd.it/p5w2a8hqemah1.png?width=2662&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c33dc2064f3745123b79577b6ce36e8a6c10ff5

Hi everyone,

I recently shipped receipt scanning for my grocery budgeting app and I thought I'd share what I built for feedback.

My app has its core features already: you set a budget, track what you spend, and over time it learns what items cost so it can warn you before you go over.

I use it myself weekly and it works great, if you actually track in the moment.

The problem is some users don't. They forget, or they're in a rush, and they get home with a full cart and nothing logged. For those users every tracking feature I'd built was dead weight, because none of it ever happened. That bugged me for months.

So I built receipt scanning as the catch-up path. Forgot to track the whole trip? Snap the receipt afterward and it backfills the entire trip at once. Nothing lost.

The pipeline:

• Snap the receipt, or import a photo from the camera roll
• Gemini vision returns structured JSON: store, date, and line items with price, quantity, category
• That gets saved as a finished shopping trip, so every item, price, and category flows straight into the spending history and the price data the app already tracks.

So now you've tracked the trip, saved the prices for next time, and you can even save it as a template to reuse. The catch? You never tracked in real time, which is kind of the whole point of my app. But hey, at least you tracked, right?

My app: https://www.grocerybudget.app/

This is v1 of the feature, so I'd love thoughts on the implementation. Would you change anything? The capture UI, the snap-or-upload choice, how I handle long receipts, the way I store it. Critiques and suggestions welcome.

My app is GroceryBudget this kind of review kinda hurts me because its freemium meaning paying is optional

Follow-up to my post from ~6 weeks ago where I shared the "$440 in 28 days, $0 ad spend" funnel for my grocery budgeting app (GroceryBudget). Here's the honest update.

What I had then (May 8):

• 8,817 new customers / 28 days, all organic
• 110 active trials, 44 active subscriptions
• $48 MRR, $440 revenue / 28 days

Where it is now (Jun 23):

• 6,977 new customers / 28 days still organic
• 44 active trials, 169 active subscriptions
• $168 MRR, $529 revenue / 28 days

What actually happened:

The trials converted. Subscriptions went from 44 to 169 (~3.8x) and MRR from $48 to $168 (3.5x). That's the part I'm happy about — the recurring base is compounding instead of churning out.

But new-user growth cooled about 20%, and the day-to-day curve dropped harder than that number suggests — the Threads/launch surge that drove the spike has faded, so my top-of-funnel is way down from the peak even though monetization improved.

The two things I'm still chewing on (same as last time, honestly):

• Making organic acquisition durable. The spike came from a few viral Threads posts feeding App Store Search. Great while it lasted, but it's not a repeatable system. For anyone who turned a one-time organic spike into a steady channel — what held up after the launch buzz died?
• Marketing to the US from the Philippines — this is my real bottleneck. The PH is 60%+ of my revenue and converts well. The US finds the app and just stays free. The honest reason I can't crack the US: I'm based in the Philippines. I don't have access to US grocery stores, so I can't film the store-haul / shelf-price TikToks that actually land with a US audience, and my organic reach on TikTok/Threads skews local no matter what I post.

Two things I'd genuinely love input on:

• (a) has anyone reached a US audience organically while based abroad — what worked?
• (b) is there a service, agency, or creator marketplace where I could pay US-based people to make grocery content / run US marketing for me? I'm open to paying, I just don't know where that kind of work actually gets done. Though I don't have that much budget for it though.

Not quitting the app yet, going from $48 to $168 MRR off the same base is enough to keep me building. Curious what the people who've been here would focus on next.

A - Answer

Hey everyone,

I recently started living independently last year and doing groceries every week and I noticed I keep overspending, so I built GroceryBudget after getting tired of the same surprise at checkout every week.

I'd shop carefully, stick to my list, feel good about it, then the cashier would read out the total and it was always higher than I expected.

• I kept running into the same questions:
• Did I account for that price increase?
• Wait, when did that item jump up in price?
• How is this already over budget?

I tried spreadsheets, Notes app, and a few budgeting apps, but most of them tracked spending after the fact like you'd log what you spent when you got home.

That didn't help me while I was actually standing in the aisle deciding what to put in the cart.

B - Better

A lot of people already use spreadsheets, notes apps, or general budgeting tools to manage grocery spending.

I tried those approaches too, but I kept running into the same gap: most tools are built for after-the-fact logging.

That works fine for simple tracking like:

• Spent $120 on groceries this week
• Over budget by $30 this month
• Review spending at end of month

But real grocery trips are messier than that. Prices change. You grab something extra. You swap one brand for another. When you're tracking after checkout, you've already committed the spend so there's nothing left to adjust.

That was the core reason I built GroceryBudget around real-time tracking.

Instead of logging a lump sum after the trip, GroceryBudget shows you a running total as you add each item, so you can make decisions before checkout, not regret them after.

It also handles parts that basic list apps miss:

• Real-time cart total with a visual budget bar so you see exactly how close you are
• Camera scan — point your phone at the shelf label and it fills in the item and price automatically, no typing needed
• Price memory — it remembers what you paid for items before and suggests the price next time
• Multiple carts — useful if you shop at different stores or split your list
• Spending insights — weekly and monthly breakdowns to see where money actually goes
• No ads, no account required to start

C - Cost

GroceryBudget is free to download and use.

The free tier covers the core shopping flow without a time limit: create carts, add items, scan prices, see your running total, and view 7 days of spending history.

There is an optional Premium upgrade for people who want the full experience:

• Full spending insights history (beyond 7 days)
• Camera scan feature
• Price history and store comparison across trips

Premium pricing:

• Monthly: $3.99
• Yearly: $19.99 (7 day free trial)
• Lifetime: $29.99

I'd love to hear your feedback, especially if you regularly shop with a budget in mind.

Thanks for reading.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/grocerybudget-shopping-list/id6749287517 

Website: https://grocerybudget.app

dropped my app on PH today and honestly have no idea if anyone will care but here we go

the idea is pretty simple. you open your cart in the app, scan any grocery label with your camera, and it gets added to your list instantly. no typing. prices autofill from your last trip so you can see your running total as you shop, not at the register when it's too late to put stuff back.

I built it because I kept leaving the grocery store $20-30 over budget every single week. every time. mental math does not work when you're rushing through aisles with a toddler behind you or just tired after work. I wanted something that just tracked it for me in real time.

launched September 2025 with zero paid ads. Today it's at 16,800 downloads, 159 active subscribers, 67 on trial, $154 MRR, $594 in the last 28 days. I'm a solo dev shipping everything myself, design, engineering, marketing, all of it.

if you've launched on PH before I'd genuinely love to know what actually moved the needle for you. and if you do any grocery budgeting at all, would love a look and an honest take on whether this is actually useful.

Let's support each other folks, upvote me and I'll upvote you back!

https://www.producthunt.com/products/grocerybudget?launch=grocerybudget-shopping-list

I kept going $20-30 over budget every grocery trip. Tried spreadsheets, tried mental math. Neither works when you've got 30 items in the cart.

The problem isn't willpower. It's timing. You only find out you overspent after checkout — when it's too late to put anything back.

So I built GroceryBudget. Set a budget, add items as you shop, see a running total and budget bar in real time. You know where you stand before you reach the register — while you can still do something about it.

The camera scan (Smart Add) turned out to be the strongest signal in the app — for both retention and conversion. Users who scan items return at 51.8% vs 18.6% for those who don't. They use it an average of 5 times — it's not a novelty, it becomes the habit. And they convert to premium at 9.69% vs 1.5% for everyone else. The feature has a free tier limit, and users who hit that limit convert at 13.1%.

Price memory was the feature users didn't know they wanted. After a few trips the app starts suggesting what you paid last time. Users stop having to type prices.

https://grocerybudget.app/

Happy to talk about the build or what the data's been showing.

Indie dev, no team, no marketing budget.

For the first 6 months I was making $20-50 a month. Real enough to feel like something. Not enough to feel like anything.

Then everything changed.

$595 in the last 28 days. From complete strangers who saw a post somewhere, went to the App Store, searched for a grocery budgeting app, and actually paid for mine.

No ads. No cold DMs. No discount codes. I posted on just on Reddit, Tiktok and Threads showing the app doing what it does. Multiple posts went viral. The RevenueCat notifications started hitting.

This June, the hype started slowing down but what's wild to me is that I was able to gain 7,038 new customers in 28 days and have 8,533 active customers. Though I know I need to improve on my conversion rate.

It's not "quit my job" money yet. The gap to sustainable is still real.

But $595 from complete strangers in 28 days means something clicked.

Two questions for the people here:

1. Do you fix conversion (~1.7%) first or grow volume first?
2. What do you actually do with early revenue reinvest into ads, save it, use it to validate a price increase?

For those interested in my app: https://grocerybudget.app

Most grocery list apps make you type every item manually. I realized there's not much that helps people to track their spending during their trip, which is why I built GroceryBudget.

You just point your camera at any grocery label and it reads the item name, price and category automatically.

The app is different from a normal list because my app lets you set a budget and track your running total as you add items.

It's available on IOS and Android: https://www.grocerybudget.app/

I built a simple grocery budgeting app after getting tired of messy spreadsheets and
finance apps that are way too complicated for "did I overspend on groceries this week."

Features:
• Track spending by cart, item, and store
• Camera label scan (snap a price tag, it logs the item)
• Spending insights and budget alerts
• Works offline, syncs in real time

I'd really appreciate it if you could:
• Download the app
• Create an account or continue as guest
• Explore it for a few minutes
• Leave an honest review if you find it useful
• Send me a screenshot of your review

On my side I'll do the same for you: install your app, actually open and use it, and
leave an honest review. Both Play Store and App Store are fine. 👍

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/grocerybudget-shopping-list/id6749287517
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ynctry.grocerybudget

Most grocery list apps make you type every item manually. I realized there's not much that helps people to track their spending during their trip, which is why I built GroceryBudget.

You just point your camera at any grocery label and it reads the item name, price and category automatically.

The app is different from a normal list because my app lets you set a budget and track your running total as you add items. Price memory learns from your past trips so planning the next one gets faster. Insights show you spend breakdowns by store and category over time.

Check it out here: https://www.grocerybudget.app/

It’s been a long road to reach this while some apps take weeks.

I want to be jealous but all I get is be inspired and study how they do it. A couple of times I wanted to drop the app since it’s not profitable but it’s just so much fun building it and using it myself that I just kind of continued lol.

This is my first app so I’ve done it all from design to dev to marketing (which is my kryptonite) and that’s why reaching this milestone is special to me.

This is mostly organic, I don’t have distribution money, I mostly built this app as a fun side project to test out what I can build on my own.

Cheers to every builder out there. Keep grinding!

edit: if anyone's interested the app is https://grocerybudget.app/ I know US appstore isn't impressive, still working on my US marketing atm.

Hey guys, I'm a product designer by background. Started this as a side project to solve my own problem as I kept walking out of the grocery store $15-20 over budget every trip and couldn't find an app that handled it the way I wanted.

I built it in React Native from the start because I researched about Android dominates the market, but only released on iOS initially. Figured I'd validate there first. Turns out users were asking for Android pretty quickly every time I try to advertise, and because the codebase was already cross-platform I just had to go through the Play Store process. That decision to use RN from day one paid off in a way I didn't expect when I started.

GroceryBudget tracks your cart total in real time as you shop with a live budget bar and you can scan items with AI so you don't have to manually type name and price.

Stack:

• Expo + Expo Router
• Firebase Firestore
• NativeWind
• Gemini 2.5 Flash for AI price tag scanning
• expo-haptics, expo-camera, expo-speech-recognition
• react-native-reanimated, react-native-purchases (RevenueCat)

What bit me:

Android was harder than I expected. I'd been polishing iOS for months so Android had rough edges, I got APK crashes, keyboard pushing modals in ways iOS never did and more which I eventually overcame.

Happy to hear from experienced RN devs. Genuine feedback welcome.

(Link in first comment)

GroceryBudget isn't a regular grocery list app. Because you can use it during grocery trips. You set a budget before you shop, add items as you go, and a live budget bar shows your running total in real time. No more checkout surprises as it warns you when you're about to overspend.

The problem was adding items while pushing a cart. I'd stop in the aisle, type the name and price and it's such a hassle to do it every single item.

So now I made AI do the heavy lifting:

You can now just point at the price tag and AI will read it instantly. No squinting at small numbers and pecking them in.

Takes about 3-5 seconds per item instead of 15-20.

Plus for every item scanned, name and price is saved so there's no need to rescan! You can track price changes per store as well.

Free on iOS and Android: https://grocerybudget.app

Built a grocery budget app as a solo dev. Been live for a few months now.

This is my 4th time remaking after studying related apps in my niche. I feel like it's too low though my app has been out for months and I'm only on my 4th lol. But I'm glad on my progress, May has probably been my best month in terms of acquiring users and conversions. ASO and organic marketing definitely helped as well.

GroceryBudget is live on IOS and Android: https://grocerybudget.app/

This used to be just a simple grocery list app that can help you avoid overspending as it tells you your budget but I realized myself that users are probably too busy during groceries to be typing manually.

I added a feature that scans labels and price tags and adds it to their list. Initially this was made using OCR so it could work offline but there’s so many layouts of labels for different stores and I had to sacrifice being offline-first for accuracy by using AI.

Would genuinely love some feedback with the current setup from other devs/designers.

The app is: https://apps.apple.com/ph/app/grocery-budget-shopping-list/id6749287517