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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your current toolset?
Combination spreadsheet and YNAB.
I'm curious about that, never heard of it. Can you elaborate or if you have a spreadsheet to share, my address is thomas@budget-fox.com (yes, I'm working on a household budget app)
How do you measure "success" in your budgeting? Is it a short-term monthly basis or a longer one?
What percentage of people have the discipline to use this app, but lack financial discipline? Website: "You want new clothes, an iced coffee, but does it fit your budget?" Oh the irony if the user were to get ads for new clothes and iced coffee...
A little off-topic, but really wondering; am i the only one annoyed by the fact that 9 out of 10 apps these days are: 1. cloud based/harvesting as much data as possible and/or 2. subscriptions I prefer apps like for example Omnifocus [1], that give you: 1. the ability to client-side encrypt your data so your data won't be sold/misused, and 2. instead of making profit of selling your data, simply let you pay a larger…
I'd also prefer that service be the one "mining" my data (to provide a better service to me) than being a middleman ferrying my data off to advertisers and third parties. Honestly, if the app/service can really make use of my data, I'd usually prefer handing it all over to them so they can do their job better over having some kind of offline experience for the misguided sake of trying to protect my privacy. Give me the option to give you data and show/tell me what you're going to do with it, and I'll happily give it to you 9 out of 10 times.
My ideal price is somewhere between a subscription and a one-off payment for something for most things, with no ads in either and some kind of cloud-based storage/backup/assistance in both. Obviously there's a lot of context left out here like how one-off payments don't work when you're paying server fees each month, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody wants to pay upfront. This is antithetical to what customers prefer.
You also pay upfront for subscriptions, although there’s usually a trial which is also a thing with non-subscription apps .
You might pay more over the lifetime of your subscription than you would paying full price for something, but in terms of your parent's comment, that is why a subscription is seen as preferred over paying for something upfront.
For example, $7/mo is a lot more palatable than buying some software for $80, especially when you're in the stage of "I don't know if I'll use this or not".
* no way to copy a budget (it's the same categories every month!) * colour scheme isn't that great (lack of contrast, but that might be me) * only $, no € or ¥. currency is a text-field! * no date on the stuff I spent, sure I could use the Note field but it's cool enough * can't "end" a budget prematurely. sure, there's "custom" but no big phat arrow pointing me at the same default which is "1st of this month to the end of this month". * can't do negative amounts. yes, I'd like to do that * having upcoming or past budgets feels weird, the blue (why blue?) "Track spending" button only shows for the oldest one. * no reports at all
I've come to realize that for the gainfully employed, above-average computer user, Excel/Numbers/LibreOffce (but mostly Excel because of PivotTables) is probably the way to go for a few reasons:
- You're looking for a post-mortem/retrospective on your spending as a way to adjust habits accordingly, not a way to pay off huge debts (YNAB is actually quite good for this latter part, but that's not what I'm looking to do)
- You don't want some program's buggy workflows getting in your way when the data is /right there/ and basically just a table of CSV values
- You want custom reports, charts, and other things
- It's just really not that hard. Any bank will allow you to export financial data in CSV or a similar format.
I just export my data every month and do a post-mortem. Easy enough. No extra cost.
I've gone through a few applications/services like this - YNAB, Mint, and a handful of Mac App Store applications that tried to accomplish more or less the same thing. They all requested some sort of subscription or hit me with ads every chance they got. Auto-import features usually end up being lack-luster for me as well, forcing me to log in every time or something along those lines. I've come to realize that for t…
I agree with you that the CSV the primary valuable artifact. Most of the pie charts and such don't add any value. The real opportunity to improve lies in the thought process I face at each individual spending decision.
A little off-topic, but really wondering; am i the only one annoyed by the fact that 9 out of 10 apps these days are: 1. cloud based/harvesting as much data as possible and/or 2. subscriptions I prefer apps like for example Omnifocus [1], that give you: 1. the ability to client-side encrypt your data so your data won't be sold/misused, and 2. instead of making profit of selling your data, simply let you pay a larger…
I actually signed up for Standard Note yesterday and have been evaluating Todoist due to those privacy concerns. My SO and I used Wunderlist for a number of years. After my wife noticed a very unexpected advertisement on Facebook, I read the privacy policy. At that point, I didn't feel comfortable putting even basic groceries in anymore. https://standardnotes.org/
You basically can't format notes at all on mobile and changing a note on mobile for me just borked the desktop formatting.
Will be great all-rounder when that is sorted though.