The wording on the site/blog was confusing. The homepage says "Download Beta" and the blog says "purchase". Sure enough, when you click "Download Beta" you're asked to pay $10.
I've updated the button to reflect reality.
PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#12I use Soulver with a file for each month’s expenses as well as a file for overall assets and liabilities. If you already have that app, it’s a great solution. It supports (global) variables and has natural language support.
It’s not plain text, but it feels like plain text.
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#13I guess it's obvious that a plain spreadsheet does this job nicely. I use one row per day and one column for each account, e.g. rent, utilities, each credit card, savings accts etc. I make a new tab each year. Very easy to see in advance the low point in your bank balance each month/pay period.
Just wanted to give 2 cents on the rationale behind this: Most people don't budget at all. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and conf…
Fair enough and I can see how this will help people a lot. I was just pushing what has worked well for me.
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#14I read a fair bit of criticism here in the comments. I think I understand where they are coming from. From my point of view, I like the simplicity of the DSL. I also love long-term projects. Great to see that you are working on it since 2018! And I think, from a western perspective, 10 bucks is a fair price to support you.
Some observations and bugs I encountered:
- A license added to Github: Currently, I don't know if I'm allowed to build an application using the package, say an integration to Obsidian or whatever.
- The example in your readme features the wrong group name ("Housing" vs "Main")
- Your DSL does not like comma-values. :)
- The DSL also does not like to see groups being used multiple times. So, what I wanted to try was:
= Housing
- 2000 Rent
- 1000 Utilities
- 500 Leisure
# 2025-05-09
= Groceries
- 10 Coffee x 12
- 10 Milk x 12
- 20 Cereal x 6
# 2025-05-10
= Groceries
- 2,60 Bread
= Income
- 5000 Salary
- 1000 Side hustle
+ Income
- Housing
- Groceries
- You are using Electron, so a Windows build would, of course, be nice.
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#15I guess it's obvious that a plain spreadsheet does this job nicely. I use one row per day and one column for each account, e.g. rent, utilities, each credit card, savings accts etc. I make a new tab each year. Very easy to see in advance the low point in your bank balance each month/pay period.
Just wanted to give 2 cents on the rationale behind this: Most people don't budget at all. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and conf…
the first level of budgeting is to track your expenses against your income.
you look at whether your bank account is growing or not.
then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending.
only after you have those categories, you can start to budget.
you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not.
if your cash flow is negative you need to find categories that you can reduce. likewise if you want to save money for future events.
i'd like an expense tracker that helps me categorize my expenses. your app seems useful only after i have done that.
the workflow i am looking for is:
i enter expenses as i make them, one line at a time. including breaking out groceries into individual items. then it should allow me to group items into categories. tracking which items don't have a group yet. finally it should tell me how much i am spending per group each month.
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#16I expected ncurses :)
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#17I love this, could you add a licence for the cli code?
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#18I'm interested but I have more questions than answers.
It might make sense to provide some system for figuring out how to create the budget, and then how to track your expenses against it.
In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.
There are electronic envelope accounting systems which retain the simplicity.
I'm a bit unsure of how this system works, where it differs, etc.
In summary, I'd love to see:
1. An explanation of how to construct a budget using your system.
2. An explanation of how to compare your spending to your budget? (bonus points if I can use my existing plain text accounting system, or at least a csv file)
3. An explanation of how to track my budget over time.
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#19I'm interested but I have more questions than answers. It might make sense to provide some system for figuring out how to create the budget, and then how to track your expenses against it. In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it. There are electronic envelope accounting systems which retain…
The processor considers monthly income when calculating your projections. It'll sum all credit and debit operations (from all flows) and calculate from there.
> In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.
I've done that, it helped me a lot!
Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
#20I read a fair bit of criticism here in the comments. I think I understand where they are coming from. From my point of view, I like the simplicity of the DSL. I also love long-term projects. Great to see that you are working on it since 2018! And I think, from a western perspective, 10 bucks is a fair price to support you. Some observations and bugs I encountered: - A license added to Github: Currently, I don't know…
I'll push a new release with the license — always forget this!
Thank you for all your observations. Two things: 1) floats were originally purposefully not allowed, for simplicity, but I might change that and 2) multiple groups with the same name are indeed not allowed, but you raise a good point: it should be possible to reference all groups with a common label if the only difference between them is an attached timestamp.
And yes, will definitely push Win/Linux releases soon!