Hi everyone – I’m in the process of developing a simple web-based budget application that’s focused on simplicity and promoting an understanding of your daily spend.
I would love to hear about everyone’s home-grown budgeting solutions or application solutions that they’re using, and I’d love to share some of my ideas as well.
I personally never found much success with apps like Mint or others where all of your expenses are automatically uploaded from your bank account and you just read off a report – I wanted to have a solution that made me responsible for every transaction I made and the ability tag and track certain incomes and expenses related to my side-hustles.
I’ve been using a homegrown Excel solution for the past few years and am now in the process of building a web-app that does even more.
I’m really interested in hearing about everyone’s experiences with budget solutions and would appreciate any perspective on the following questions:
I’m excited to hear back from everyone and I’m going to try and get a landing page up in the short-term that will explain the idea in more detail and let you signup for updates.
I’ll respond to any comments or questions that come up!
Thanks – John
Hey John.
I am not your target audience, but more of a "competitor". I work on https://moneypin.io which will give you budgeting + a lot more. However I am willing to share knowledge.
If you are interested, email me at skwee357 [at] gmail.com
Saw zero replies and don’t want to discourage you. I think your idea is good if you pitch it as the anti-Mint.
I currently use Mint. It has easy integration with my accounts, auto categorizing, budget notifications when going over, easy editing and costs me $0.
If you pitch it as: we don’t sell your data, can always export/import your own spreadsheets and some weekly or monthly reporting features, a dashboard and notification functionality, I think those would be handy.
Have you tried selling this to businesses looking to do expense reporting and tracking?
Thanks for the great feedback - I'm not discouraged, I know that the idea of a budget could be thought of as kind of boring or lackluster, but money is on the forefront of everyone's mind and most people are incapable of properly reading a budget. I read an article just the other day that 60% of adults don't have a budget and another study that majority of American's can't come up with $1,000 for an emergency in two weeks time, which just blows my mind how on the edge everyone lives.
Your pitch actually reads a lot like the "differentiators & features" that I came up with. Also, by maintaining the budget yourself you start to shift your mindset because you know have to go enter that transaction later, so hopefully it leads to a lifestyle spend shift for the user.
At the moment I'm just focused on building out the core budget features that I have right now in my Excel file, and a little more functionality as well. Business may be down the road but it's not in my headlights at the moment.