A budget that knows what month it is
A budget that plans against a normal month instead of a twelve-month average — so the two months that carry a third paycheque, and the one that carries the insurance, stop being a surprise.
- Works with no account
- Your budget, in a file you own
- Free, and the free plan is the whole app
Left over each month
$441
- A normal month
- $5,410
- Planned out
- −$4,969
Committed
53%
Rent, bills and debt as a share of a normal month.
Saving
12%
$625 a month, transferred not spent.
November — the heavy month
$5,651
$936 more than February, because the bursts land here.
Two arithmetic facts break most budgets. Neither is complicated, and neither survives being divided by twelve.
- 26
- biweekly paydays a year
- 2
- months that carry a third cheque
- 6
- cadences, none of them averaged
- 0
- accounts required
Averages lie about paycheques
Twenty-six paydays do not divide into twelve months
Paid every two weeks, you get twenty-six cheques a year. An average smears that into 2.17 a month, which is a figure you have never once been paid.
Every income source carries its next date, and the schedule is worked out on the real calendar. Two months a year come out carrying a third cheque, and the app tells you which two rather than quietly spreading them over the other ten.
In the example: January and July carry an extra $2,480. Averaged away, that is $413 a month of income you never actually receive.
2 months bring an extra paycheque
- A normal month
- The extra cheque
- Normal-month income
Averages lie about bills
Insurance does not arrive in twelfths
Car insurance, registrations, the annual subscriptions — they land in bursts. Divided by twelve they look affordable every month and unaffordable in March.
Costs are stored with the cadence they are actually charged on and the month they are anchored to. The year view puts them back where they land, so the heavy month shows up as a heavy month.
In the example: November costs $936 more than February. A monthly average would have shown you twelve identical months.
Cost by month
- Housing
- Everyday
- Subscriptions
- Transport
- Debt payoff
- Savings
- Fun & eating out
Four views, one budget
Enter it once, read it four ways
The same numbers, asked four different questions. Nothing is re-entered and nothing is kept in two places.
Summary
What a normal month looks like. One number leads — what is left over — then the allocation by group, the caps you set, and how this month drains day by day.
Budget
The editor. Income sources with a frequency and a next date, groups by kind, and the line items inside them. Enter a cost the way it is charged; it is levelled for you.
Year
Twelve calendar months, honestly. Cost by month, the extra-paycheque months, the running balance, the biggest line items, and every charge that is not monthly.
Forecast
Cash over time. A starting balance, a horizon, an optional return, and whether the leftover is banked. One-off plans draw the line down on the date they land.
A normal month, by group
The next 5 years
Every chart here has a table view behind the toggle, and every value a tooltip shows is reachable without a pointer. See what else is in there.
How it goes
Three passes and you are done
There is no import, no connection to approve and no onboarding to sit through. You type what you know.
- 1
Put in what comes in
Each income source with its frequency and the next date it lands. The calendar does the rest.
- 2
Group what goes out
Fixed, flexible, debt, savings. Add the line items at the amount they are charged, on the cadence they are charged.
- 3
Read the year
The normal month, the heavy month, the running balance, and the forecast — all from the same numbers, with nothing smoothed.
Built like a tool
Your money data stays where it is
The app is static files and arithmetic. That is not a limitation we are dressing up — it is the reason there is nothing to breach and nothing to pay for.
Nothing leaves the browser
No account, no server, no analytics on your numbers. The budget is held in local storage and written to a file you choose. There is nowhere for us to look.
A file you own
Link a real .json file and every later change is written into it. A few kilobytes of plain records — readable, diffable, and yours after we are gone.
Real cadences
Weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual, yearly — with a due day or an anchor month. Nothing is rounded to a month it does not happen in.
Legible by construction
Every chart ships direct labels and a table view, so no value depends on telling two colours apart. Dark mode is its own set of steps, not an inversion.
Yours to take
Export the whole budget whenever you like, in the same format the app reads. No lock-in, because there is nothing to be locked into.
Fast, and small
Hand-rolled SVG charts, no chart library, no framework beyond React. The whole app is a fraction of the size of the page you are reading this on.
Why people keep it open
It tells you the month you are actually in
I had been short every month for three years and could never find the leak. There was no leak. I was budgeting against eight percent more income than I get in a normal month.
The year view is the whole product for me. Two of my months are twice the others because of insurance and registration, and now those two months look like what they are.
It is the only budgeting thing I have used that did not ask for my bank login. The file sits in my documents folder next to my tax returns, which is exactly where I want it.
Pricing
Free on one device. Paid only if you want it on two.
The whole app runs with no server, so the whole app is free. Sync costs us money to run, which is why sync is the thing that costs money.
- LocalThe whole app, on this device, for nothing.Free
- PlusThe same budget on every device you use.$4/mo
- HouseholdOne budget, more than one income.$7/mo
- Paid plans sync a blob we cannot read. Yearly billing shown.
Questions
The things people ask first
No. Open the app and start typing. An account only exists to sync the same budget to a second device, and that is the only thing you pay for.
In your browser's local storage, and — if you ask for it — in a .json file you pick on your own disk. On Chrome-family browsers the app writes every later change straight into that file.
No, deliberately. A budget is a plan, not a ledger of what already happened. Nothing here needs read access to your accounts, so nothing here asks for it.
You still have the file, and the format is plain records you can read in any text editor. Nothing about the app's value depends on us existing next year.
Because the app does its whole job on one device with no server involved, and charging for that would be charging for nothing. Sync costs us money to run, so sync is what costs money.
Something else? Ask us directly — or read the rest of the answers.
It takes about ten minutes to find out
Open the app and enter one income source and one bill. The example budget is already loaded if you would rather read someone else's numbers first.