Ask HN: Budgeting and Expense app? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Budgeting and Expense app?

Looking for an app that I thought was simple but seems to not be:

- Can input things I spend money on quickly and easily eg. Buy a chocolate bar, click a button, enter the amount and maybe choose a category then done.

- Set monthly budgets for categories

- Tells me how I am doing based on what I enter

I know YNAB exists but seems insanely expensive for what I want.

Nice to haves: - on Android but also a web interface - privacy features like being open source and having everything encrypted similar to Standard Note.

Any suggestions?

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Mint is ok, but I feel like there is a gap in the market for budgeting apps. I still have a spreadsheet of general categories like "groceries", "restaurants", "discretionary", and "cell phones/internet" that I prefer to group things into. The way Mint tries to categorize my transactions makes it frustrating to use. They're trying to push users into using their categories instead of letting me create categories and assign my transactions to them.

Mint allows you to create categories and you can assign certain transactions to them, and then click the "always apply this to this category" radio button.

As far as I know there isn't one. I still use YNAB4 because I don't want to "upgrade". I've been thinking about building my own budgeting system because the only real alternative seems to be excel sheets.

I'm actually in the same boat. I've been paranoid of using ynab online because of giving a company all of my financial data. I don't know if it is unfounded, but I do have to admit using ynab on the desktop is kind of inconvenient.

Me too. It’s not perfect in the methodology, but the UX is great and I can hack around it’s limitations. E.g. try using the envelope system when doing renovations! Anyway good software. Problem with budget software is users are too tight to spend a lot of money on it so there are plenty of half assed products out there.

I believe Spendee meets your criteria. What I like about it most is that you can add expenses via Android home screen widget very easily.

YNAB does what you want and only costs $6.99 a month. IMHO it's worth every penny.

YNAB4 did it for about $50 IIRC, over 10 years that's 6% of the price.

Yeah, I paid $60 for YNAB4 back in 2015. I've already paid only a fraction of the price, and use it constantly. Subscription services don't seem like they cost a lot, but cost a ton.

It's quite hard to find finance software that isn't subscription based now.

I have been looking for such an app but have never come across one until now.

I’m curious has anyone used Airtable for this?

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