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Feedback for simple budget app

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of building out a simple, web-based budget app that doesn't have automatic uploads of bank and spend information.

Why no automatic uploads? Removing the task of manually uploading your expenditures and income decreases your discipline and visibility into your daily spend.

I'm looking for feedback or features that someone might want in a simple budget app hosted online as a service.

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    Hey, here are my thoughts:

    • I think the decision to include automatic uploads or not, comes down to who you are building this for. When I was rocking a minimum wage paycheck and every cent counted - manual was really important for me to keep our household finances in order and to force myself to be aware of every dollar spent (as you mentioned above). But now that I've worked my way up to a decent salary, have a kid, a side hustle, and other hobbies and responsibilities I don't have the time to manually manage every transaction and unfortunately I will immediately reject a budgeting app that requires manual input. This is just my experience though, your mileage may vary.

    • Adjacent to the above point, are you trying to make money off of this? If you're going the ad route, then that's fine, but if you're going to charge you're going to really need to answer the who question above. Let's say for a second my experience above is representative of your audience - in the days I was manually managing my budget I was using excel/google sheets because I didn't have the disposable income to pay for a budgeting app. Now I have the disposable income if I so choose to, but I have no interest in manual transaction uploads. I could be the minority here though, just something to dig into.

    • What makes you distinct from Mint, YNAB, etc? These are well known companies that offer free or paid services, and do a great job. Niche down and niche down again. A good example of this is Tiller (https://www.tillerhq.com/) - they standout with a unique value add.

    • One personal thought, and maybe an idea for you on that value-add. I want a budgeting app that challenges the norm of a month-based budget. Income these days is fluid, especially in family households where you have multiple incomes that may vary in amount month to month and potentially include side gigs/hustles that also vary on when and how much get paid out. I'm not sure what that looks like, but it would be unique.

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      Thanks - I think you make a lot of great points.

      One of this things I'm trying to tackle is your 3rd point in particular.

      I'm a consultant for a large firm and I travel weekly, with this comes my per diem income and I also have a side-hustle that has some cash inflow as well - I haven't been able to find a budgeting solution that lets me tag and track those different incomes with the associated expenses - this is something I hope to address with my product.