You should check out ynab and /r/financier
Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#12It hasn’t been released yet, but know that Microsoft is looking to hit this space as well with their Money app.
If you’re looking at DIY budgeters who don’t want third-party access, I’d make sure that subviews of specific goals, like a pay down chart of student loans or month-over-month of credit card bills. Since you’re manually entering information, your primary sell is probably going to be UI-based.
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#13Hi, I don't use budgeting on a regular basis, but when I need it for a project or a trip I use ledger-cli.org
It isn't a "batteries included" solution, but with a little creativity it allows you to do pretty much anything you want.
If you are prepared to even build your own app, I thing it might interest you.
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#14Honestly, I need two things: a simple interface that let's me log an expense in a few seconds, and a detailed analysis that I can look at (spendings per weekday, per week, per month; maybe an overview that links similar expenses [food] together so that I can see the frequencies?). If that is well done then I'm mostly set.
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#15* Offline.
* Open source.
* No telemetry sent.
* One-time fee, no 'subscription'.
* Linux-compatible.
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#16Honestly, I need two things: a simple interface that let's me log an expense in a few seconds, and a detailed analysis that I can look at (spendings per weekday, per week, per month; maybe an overview that links similar expenses [food] together so that I can see the frequencies?). If that is well done then I'm mostly set.
> in a few seconds
And in the bare minimum of clicks. Intelligent defaults of cursor placement and number pad.
I've tried a few and cobbling together the best of the best I think it goes something like:
1) take out phone and unlock
2) click on app
3) app opens into entry mode with default category already selected, number pad up and ready to go, and the cursor on the entry. So, all I have to do is enter the price and hit enter.
3) -alt And if I'm entering an non default category it's a click away with large buttons and clear feedback.
4) Close phone
5) put it back in my pocket.
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#17Honestly, I need two things: a simple interface that let's me log an expense in a few seconds, and a detailed analysis that I can look at (spendings per weekday, per week, per month; maybe an overview that links similar expenses [food] together so that I can see the frequencies?). If that is well done then I'm mostly set.
This perfectly describes a Flutter app I made for tracking expenses that me and my SO have been using for the past two years. At first it took some getting used to, but now logging an expense with the correct category takes 2-3 extra secs. We store all this data in Google sheets for easy analysis, and also export to Google BigQuery for easy querying. Having the ability to SQL through all my expenses is just so awesome and powerful
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#18Has anyone used lunchmoney.app?
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#19Looks like a few people are starting to create their own budgeting apps. I've seen Lunch Money in the space for multi-currency support. I'm also building an app, using Flutter and some backend server/database, haven't decided yet. Main features I'm thinking about:
- Open source, self hostable with a paid hostable subscription option that syncs to different devices. Unfortunately one time payments don't really cut it for sustained development.
- Native performing clients for web, mobile, and desktop (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux are all supported by Flutter, but the app will not necessarily have native UI though). This can be done through Flutter which compiles ahead of time without running on a JS VM like Electron or React Native. Hopefully you should get good performance.
- On the feature side of things, rolling daily/weekly/monthly budgets, with the envelope system where you allocate a budget per day/week/month and try not to go over it. If you do, you'll have to pull from another budget. Also gonna have a way to budget for some event in the future, and split up that amount into timeperiod based increments. For example, if you estimate you want to take a 6k vacation in a year, the app would help you budget 500 a month.
- Undecided on whether it should be manual transaction entry only or whether it should integrate with banks, Venmo, and the like. Some people like one, and not the other.
- Analysis over timescales and categories. Especially annoying in Mint to mark a merchant like "AMZN" into "Amazon" and not have it propagate across all findings of the word "AMZN".
- Similar to analysis, have forecasting as to what I might spend in the future. This can be from recurring transactions, pattern recognition and the like.
- Have good splits. Other apps don't let you split money easily, if from Venmo or whatnot. If I split dinner with a friend, I don't want to see that I've spent all of it in my food budget, only that I actually spent half and my friend recompensated me.
What else would you want?
Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?
#20Has anyone used lunchmoney.app?
I have, at least for the free trial amount. It didn't really stick for me, because of no mobile app so I can't add transactions on the go, and the budgets just seemed...forgiving? I want to control my spending, I don't want to be told it's okay and that I can spend more. At least for me, I want hard cut offs. It's a fine service, it just didn't work for me necessarily. I also don't use their multi-currency support as I don't travel or have multiple currencies.