I've been a YNAB and LiquidBudget user. I am looking at using the non zero-based style for a period while our cashflow isn't suiting the zero-based style.
Any recommendations for normal budgeting apps? Ideally they're free or very small fee. Website is preference over smartphone apps.
So does automod not actually remove posts?
I've seen a bajillion projects in the last week self-promoing with the automod comment at the top. I'm working on my own app too but have been patiently waiting for a Sunday and trying to be helpful in here in the meantime. Is this subreddit used by any actual consumers at this point?
I'm wondering if I should just post my app in here anyway
After nearly a month of use, I feel it worth sharing that the Envelope Budget app is, in my 27 years of envelope budgeting, one of the best apps I've ever used and feel it is worth sharing for those looking for a good solutions (because there aren't a lot of them).
Let me start by saying that I don't work for this company, am not an affiliate, haven't been asked to write this, and I personally pay to use their app.
Background Context/Experience
I've been envelope budgeting since 1999. For many years I ran it in a custom spreadsheet, which was easy enough when I was young and had no money.
Some time in 2007, I started using mvelopes.com, which was better than my spreadsheet, but back then they built it in Flash (if you know, you know). I had an on-again, off-again relationship with them until they finally dissolved in 2020-something.
During my on/off with Mvelopes, I tried several other programs (hoping to find something better) including Every Dollar, YNAB, Monarch, mint, and Good Budget. None of them were ever the perfect fit.
Every Dollar - I'll confess that I used it only when it initially launched. For me, it was too strictly tied to Dave's philosophy and didn't have enough flexibility for me to run my budget the way I wanted.
YNAB - I never made it out of the trial period. I have a long email back and forth with the support team trying to understand how YNAB was treating my CC payments that never ended up making sense. On top of that, it being pricier, I just gave up.
Monarch - Loved it... but really doesn't support envelope budgeting.
Mint - I was desperate. It was not envelope budgeting
Good Budget - This is where I landed after Mvelopes closed up shop. It is pretty good. I mean, the name isn't "great budget" but it is good. My biggest complaint is that nothing ever changed. I only ever remember 1 big release, and that was bank connections. There were so many small things that could have been improved, but never were. Simple things like assigning an envelope, they never put an option to type to search. Always annoying to scroll to find the envelope. Just little stuff like that always left me wanting more.
Finding EnvelopeBudget.com
Every ~6 months I go looking to see what else is out there for envelope budgeting apps. There's rarely anything new or good.
Last month I ran a query in Claude and it randomly mentioned "EnvelopeBudget.com" and I decided to check it out. Initial impression from the website was good enough for me to sign up for the free trial.
In the past 20 days I've become a convert, threw down my money, and am canceling my Good Budget subscription.
Here's what makes this app better than any other I've used in 27 years.
I will say, the one quirky thing is their bank connectivity. They use SimpleFin, which is like an extra $1.50 a month and only pull 1x a day. I'd probably prefer plaid to connect, but that's really one of the only "complaints" I have.
If you haven't been happy with your current envelope budget app, or are looking to give envelope budgeting a try, give this app a go.
Happy to answer any questions.
Hey! Calling out to the financial guru gods and wondering if anyone would be kind enough to share their budgeting spreadsheet with me?
My family has been spending too much and I have been tasked with writing out a budget to tighten things up so we can hopefully by a house one day but I am lost.
Also would very much appreciate any helpful tips and tricks, YouTube channels, books, etc that you found helpful.
Any and all help is greatly appreciated 🙏
When I first started using YNAB, I couldn’t believe how unintuitive reconciliation was. It always felt like an extra chore, so when I started building Basis, getting rid of it was one of the things I cared about most.
With Basis, there is no reconciling. Basis handles that work in the background, so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing, compare balances, hunt down the problem, and get everything matched up again. You can just budget.
I've also put a lot of work into making Basis as cross-platform as possible. We’re available on web and iOS right now, with Android on the horizon.
There's also have a completely free manual tier. If you don’t want to connect your banks through Plaid or anything else, you don’t have to. You can use Basis manually for free, forever, and never pay a dime.
My philosophy is pretty simple. You should only have to pay for the features that cost me money. If you aren’t connecting your banks, you really don’t cost me anything, so why would I charge you?
If you’re interested in giving Basis a try, check it out at basisbudget.com. Let me know what you think, and I’m more than happy to answer any questions.
Happy budgeting!
Hey there, I'm an app developer, currently building a Expense/Budget Tracker app. I've made an MVP looking for more features to implement and polish the current app. What features would you add if you're to build one.
Budget Name: Fairway
Budget Style: Cash-flow forecasting / day-by-day balance projection (not zero-based, not envelope, not category budgeting)
How similar do you consider your budget to YNAB?
Deliberately different. YNAB and most tools here felt like rear-view mirrors. I was always looking backwards, sorting spending into buckets, but never looking forward to see where I was actually headed. Fairway is purely forward-looking and it projects your checking-account balance day by day so you can see what’s coming.
I got tired of still being surprised by my bank balance even when the categories were perfect. So I built the thing that simply projects your actual checking balance forward and surfaces the only two numbers that mattered to me:
• the low point (the worst upcoming balance day in the forecast — it can be months or even years out)
• runway (how many months of cushion your current checking + savings will last if income stopped today)
Given that every bill was typed in, those two numbers gave me the most comfort.
No bank linking required. No spend categories as the product. Everything lands on a clean calendar view. I also built it around a few other things that matter to me: quick 50/30/20 glance, person totals (me / spouse / joint), and a debt section that auto-sorts payoff order the way you want (avalanche or snowball). Everything funnels into a rolling calendar — you can literally forecast decades ahead if you want, just keep scrolling.
Free spouse account. 7-day free trial, no card needed.
For me personally it’s a daily habit: type in today’s checking balance, check my “okay number” (the floor I don’t want to go below, for me that is $7,500), and immediately see the low point in my forecast so I can decide whether to cut something, pick up extra hours, or just leave it alone.
https://fairwayforecasting.com/#lowpoint
Question for people who left YNAB or still get caught off guard by their balance even when they “budget”:
Do you think seeing your low point coming would actually change how you manage your money, or is zero-based still the only thing that works for you?
Happy to answer anything.
Hey everyone. Today's post will be smaller but still very impactful. This week I have been working to better manual transactions by adding the ability to add receipts to transactions and even better, forward/auto-forward them and have them analyzed. Using AI to pull line items, suggested categories (per item). This can either be done on the mobile application taking a photo of the receipt or by forwarding it to an email address. We have two types of email to make life simple, a single email address that anyone can send to and it checks your account and attaches it to your account, or a randomized inbox that is specific to you (anyone with knowledge can send to this address). What this enables us to do is allow you to either add trusted emails to your account, and any email you send to the system will be associated with your account. Or if you want to add auto-forward rules to something like Amazon, where it will come to us from Amazon, then you can have it forward to the private inbox.
Keeping in theme with security, the inbox does not store data; it is used to pull the information and store it in our secure storage encrypted to your client key. Remember our platform encrypts all your data with a customer key that is unique to you.
This is the first bit of AI that we have added, as we want to be cautious around what we handle and make sure that it is only handled in the way you want it. This is the reason most for our platform will be a scoped MCP that you can hook your preferred AI to, allowing it to or restricting access to certain data types. However, the AI feature is opt-in, so you need to enable it. Otherwise, you can still upload receipts and create your line items manually if you wish.
Now for the bad side, this feature isn't released just yet. It will be released this week after I iron out a few more prompt flows to make sure it is good to go. If you would like to start checking it out and letting me know how it works for you, sign up for the waitlist at https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/ and I will be in touch. Remember we also have the new feedback portal at https://feedback.403fin.io where you can upvote and discuss what features you would like to see.
Lastly, I feel the application is ready for release, but I promised in my first post(s) that I would not release it publicly until I had a third-party penetration test. That way, my claims about security are put to the test. This isn't just throwing AI at it and saying I am good; this is a third-party professional that will come in when they have time over the next couple of weeks, and put it through its paces. Once it is good, meaning if anything is found, it is fixed and retested, then I will remove the access code and be able to release. Sadly, this just means I am out the added time, but I believe in security and wouldn't want to publish until then. I have yet to see any other application hold a launch until their security is tested.
I’ve been looking for a budgeting app that actually fits the way I manage my money, and I’m starting to feel like I’m asking for something unreasonable 😂
I’ve tried quite a few apps, but I keep running into the same problems. A lot of them are either:
Way too complicated. They give you 500 different charts, reports, accounts, investment tracking, net worth calculations, etc. when I mainly want to know where my money is going and how much I can safely spend.😩
Too focused on tracking expenses after I’ve spent the money instead of helping me plan what to do with my money beforehand.
Built around a budgeting method that feels unnecessarily rigid. I don’t necessarily want every dollar to have a job and have to constantly move money between categories.
Extremely dependent on bank syncing. This is a big problem for me because I don’t necessarily have access to the kind of bank integrations these apps expect, so I need something that works well with manual entry too.
Full of useful features that are locked behind a subscription. I’m fine paying for a genuinely good app, but I’m not interested in paying $100+ a year just to get basic budgeting functionality.
What I’m really looking for is something relatively simple and visual.
Ideally, I want to be able to:
Set up my own categories (food, transportation, entertainment, savings, etc.)
Set a budget for each category
Easily record expenses manually
See how much I’ve spent and how much I have left
Track savings goals
Handle recurring expenses/bills
See upcoming expenses
Have a clean, modern iOS interface
Ideally have some kind of calendar or timeline view
Not require me to connect my bank account
Not overwhelm me with a million financial features I don’t need
Basically, I want an app that helps me make decisions about my money, not just a prettier version of my bank statement.
For people who have tried several budgeting apps: what would you recommend for this kind of use case, and what do you dislike about the app you use?
I’m especially interested in hearing about smaller/lesser-known iOS apps too. I’m not necessarily looking for the most popular one, just one that actually works well, and that’s looks pretty .🙌🏼
I used YNAB for almost two years. Categories, envelopes, the whole method — I actually stuck with it, which apparently puts me ahead of most people. And it still didn't stop me from overdrafting.
Took me way too long to realize the problem wasn't spending. It was timing. Three bills were hitting my account two days before my paycheck landed, every single month, and no budgeting category was going to fix that. I had the money — I just didn't have it yet when the bills wanted it.
YNAB is built around "give every dollar a job," which is great for figuring out where your money should go. It's not really built to answer "what's my balance going to be on the 14th." I found myself exporting stuff to a spreadsheet just to map bills against paydays, and that got old fast.
So I built a small tool that does exactly that — you put in your bills and income once, and it shows your projected balance for every day going forward, based on when things actually hit. Not a budget. Just a forecast, so I can see the dip coming instead of finding out from my bank.
It's called CashFlowCast if anyone wants to poke at it (cashflowcast.com) — but mostly I'm curious if the timing thing was just my problem or if other people switched off YNAB for a similar reason. Anyone else find the envelope method didn't actually solve the "will I have money on Thursday" question?
Hey — I'm the person behind Zaphar, and this is the first post in what I hope becomes a real community.
Here's the honest version of why this exists: I was trying to budget in Excel, and it was costing me time I genuinely didn't have. Update a cell here, reconcile a receipt there, forget to log something for two weeks, give up, start over. I didn't need another spreadsheet. I needed something that just told me where I stood.
So I built Zaphar for myself first. The idea was simple: it should work like a buddy who actually knows your financial situation — not a dashboard you have to go interrogate. When's your next paycheck landing? When's the cell phone bill due? The electric bill? Zaphar keeps track so that's not one more thing living in your head.
One thing I did on purpose: **Zaphar never links to your bank or card accounts.** No bank login, no read-access to your accounts, nothing. You tell it what happened — snap a receipt or just say it out loud — and that's the only data it has. I wanted a tool that helps you build financial freedom, not one that needs your bank credentials to do it. Complete privacy, by design, not as an afterthought.
This community is for people who want that same thing — less time spent managing money, more actual awareness of it. Financial freedom isn't one big move, it's a lot of small ones, and this is meant to be a step toward that.
**A few ground rules while this place is young:**
**Curious to hear from this community:** would you actually want a budgeting app that *never* touches your bank login — even if it means a bit more manual input? Or is auto-syncing worth the tradeoff for you? Genuinely want to know before I build more.
We're in Early Access right now — comment or check the pinned link if you want in early. 👇
Share your budgets today midnight - midnight eastern time! You can share them below or make your own post. Stick around in the comments to respond to questions, share screenshots, tell us why you made it, and what your favorite parts are!
I know my checking account balance isn't what I can spend because I need to keep some money in there to pay bills and my credit cards. But there's no easy way to know exactly how much I can actually spend from the balance in my checking account. What makes it even harder is that some months I get paid only twice and other months I get paid three times, so I need to keep a certain amount in my checking account for the two-paycheck months, so I have enough for the monthly bills. Is there an app that solves this problem and just tells me every week one consistent number of what I can actually spend beyond all my bills?
YNAB has issues with my bank account - doesn't sync. I did get it to connect but it doesn't sync reliability. It is 13 days since it last synced currently.
I have look at many other options but they all use Plaid and there are issues connecting to Vancity (credit union in Canada). I can connect to my credit card (BMO) but not my checking account (Vancity).
Any suggestions for Canadian users (in particular Vancity clients)?
A friend of mine recommended YNAB to manage my family's budget. I got started yesterday but as I was setting the budgets, I already felt way out of my depth. Like I should have studied for a test that I didn't know about. Does this feeling get better? What tips would you give a first time user to feel less overwhelmed? Thanks!
I love YNAB but I've been shopping around for an alternative that solved the transaction auto-categorization problem that YNAB couldn't. It seems that Lunch Money is way more automated and adjustable in terms of categorizing transactions, while offering zero based budgeting and the envelope method that YNAB is sought after for.
I just opened my Lunch Money account and found that it's super robust and has way more flexibility and features than YNAB. So you can choose how to want to budget and account for everything so that you don't need to stick to the zero-based budgeting or envelope method if you don't want to.
The mobile app is pretty nice but it's only useful if you first sign up in a web browser. And opening the mobile app works best if you start with a single budget. There's a little bug that blocks the button to select your budget. But there's a workaround... You just need to open another app then switch back to it without quitting it.
The ios mobile app is reminds me of Gusto. Super sleek and fresh. It makes me want to use it way more than the web browser version, although the web browser version is much more suited for desktop and laptops than for mobile use.
Anyway, I'm liking it so far and thought I'd share my referral link so you can get 1 free month of Lunch Money after your 30-day trial ends**,** so essentially that's 60-days for free!
Here's the link:
Confession: I got a little annoyed with the personal finance apps paying only lip service to being used via agents. I was still stuck doing most of the "management" myself, with bare bones (or very limited) functionality around simple chat-based querying.
So I've built this MCP server that connects to bank accounts via Plaid or statement uploads, and makes all functionality of the average personal finance app available via agents. You only use Wise Penny once to set things up, and never need to log in again. Just use your agent (or chatgpt / claude / etc) for the rest of time (unless Plaid breaks, unavoidable).
This is hosted for now, because using Plaid requires getting through a compliance process, which I'm not sure most people would want to do. Can open source it if people would like to host it themselves. Would love feedback.
InfinitelyZero
Formerly known as SetAside Budget Planner.
Some of the main features:
• Zero-based budgeting
• Paycheck planning / Expected Income
• Helps figure out what needs to be funded from which paycheck
• Bills and due-date planning
• Funding Suggestions
• Money Timeline showing what your cash should look like between paychecks
• Expected everyday spending built into the timeline, not just bills
• Multiple account tracking
• Credit card payment planning
• Overspending alerts and tools to cover it
• Transaction import
• Manual budgeting — no bank connection required
Storage / Privacy:
• Local mode using on-device storage
• Cloud mode using Supabase
• Choose Local or Cloud depending on how you want to use the app
• Local-to-Cloud and Cloud-to-Local copy tools
• Backup and restore support
Desktop:
• Working production desktop app, not publicly released yet — submitted to the Microsoft Store for certification
• Encrypted desktop backup files
• User-selected backup locations
• Backups can be saved locally, to an external drive, NAS, or a folder synced with OneDrive / Google Drive / Dropbox
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Light and Dark Blue themes
If anyone is interested in trying it out, I’ll give out a limited number of lifetime licenses to some early testers. Just message me.
Thank you!
I'm Jerry, founder of Monni.
I'm giving 20 people a free 1-year membership in exchange for blunt feedback on the first week.
Monni is an iOS money brief for people who want a lighter weekly check-in instead of a full budgeting system.
Best fit:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/monni-ai-money-tracker/id6778174904
Website: https://monni.io
DM me if you want one. I'll reply asking for the email to grant access to, then manually add the free year.
Please don't post your email publicly, and don't send balances, screenshots, account numbers, addresses, passwords, or private financial details. High-level workflow feedback is enough.
I may be biased because I'm the founder of Monni.io.
Hi everyone,
I've spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at budgeting apps over the past year, partly because I wanted one for myself and partly because I kept thinking, why doesn't something just do all of this in one place?
I'm a CPA and built Anvi with my sister, who's a civil engineer.
It's not really trying to be YNAB or Monarch. The idea was to give you a more complete picture of your finances - not just where your money went, but what you're doing with it now and where it could take you.
You can upload your bank or credit-card statements as a PDF or CSV instead of connecting your bank account. Anvi extracts the transactions, detects duplicates to flag potential scams, figures out income vs. expenses, and categorizes everything. If you correct a category, it learns from that and applies your preference to future transactions.
Some of the smart features we built are:
One thing we deliberately don't do is connect directly to your bank. You download the statement yourself, Anvi processes it, and the original statement file is discarded rather than stored as a document.
It's live at https://myanvi.co now. The app will be available in Apple and Google Play Store next month.
We're still early, so I'm genuinely curious what people who have already used YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, spreadsheets, etc. think.
What is the thing you still feel is missing from the personal finance apps you've tried?
I'd love to hear your feedback.
Thank you!! and we appreciate your feedback!