The problem
Every budgeting app I had tried died the same way — logging a cup of tea took six taps, so I stopped, so the numbers went wrong, so I stopped opening it.
What I built
- Three-tap entry: amount, category, done. Date and account default to sensible values.
- Envelope budgets that roll over, because real months are not identical.
- Recurring bills with a reminder that arrives before the money leaves.
- A monthly review screen: what you planned, what happened, and the three categories responsible for the difference.
Decisions worth explaining
No bank integration. It is the most requested feature and the reason the app would need compliance work, a vendor contract and a subscription. Manual entry, made fast, is the whole product thesis.
Amounts are integers in the smallest currency unit. Again.
Results
- Used daily by my family for over a year — the only usage metric that matters here.
- Monthly review takes about two minutes.
- Still the project I use to try a new tool before I put it anywhere near a client.