BudgetWizard
Expense tracking, simplified. Finances, clarified
I graduated as an engineer in 2019, started my first job, and did what a lot of us do: tracked my money in an Excel sheet. It worked — until it didn't. Once I was juggling cash, a debit card, a couple of credit cards, and multiple accounts, manually updating that spreadsheet became a chore I kept skipping. So I built the tool I wished existed. It's called BudgetWizard (https://budgetwizard.app).
What it is: a simple, privacy-first budgeting app. You set up your categories and payment methods, then log transactions either with a fast pre-filled form or by importing a CSV. A clean dashboard shows what you earn and spend each month, your trends, and your averages. No investment dashboards, no net-worth tracking — just budgeting, done well.
The deliberate choice — no bank linking. Most budgeting apps start with "connect your bank account." I didn't want to hand a third party my banking login just to see where my money goes. So BudgetWizard uses manual entry + CSV import instead. The small bit of friction is actually the feature: when you type "$62, dinner out," you feel it. Auto-imported transactions just blur into a feed nobody reads.
I'd love feedback from other solo founders: does "privacy as a feature" actually move people to switch, or is bank-sync convenience just too strong a default to beat? Honest takes welcome.
4 Comments
I like the focus on simplicity and privacy. While bank syncing is convenient, there are definitely users who prefer having more control over their financial data and don't mind a little manual input. The challenge will be finding people who value privacy enough to trade some convenience for it, but that can be a strong differentiator in a crowded budgeting app market.
The “refuses to link your bank” angle is strong. It turns a missing feature into a trust signal. Some users would rather do one extra step than hand over sensitive access.
Hey Juan Cardenas! Came across BudgetWizard on the Build Board and gave it a quick test run — really like the concept of simplified expense tracking. Since I'm a QA engineer, I couldn't help but run through a few flows. Here's what I found in about 15 minutes:
🔴 Critical
Forgot Password is broken — the reset email sends, but it has no working reset link. This currently blocks any user who needs to recover their account.
🟠 Medium
No rate limiting on login attempts — I tried multiple invalid logins back to back with no lockout, captcha, or delay triggered. Worth adding before this scales, since it's an easy target for brute-force attempts.
🟡 Low / Polish
Calculator field caps oddly — in the monthly income field, entering more than 6 digits silently overwrites the value to "1000000" instead of validating or capping properly.
Signup flow feels abrupt — success toast shows, but there's no loading state and the redirect to the landing page happens very suddenly. A short loading/transition state would make it feel more polished.
"BudgetWizard" text on signup/login isn't clickable — users likely expect clicking the logo/brand name to take them back to the homepage.
No loading indicator on link clicks — clicking text links gives no visual feedback, so it can feel like nothing happened for a second.
No pressure at all, just thought this might be useful since you're actively building. If it's helpful, I do full manual QA passes professionally — functional testing, edge cases, security checks, cross-browser/device — happy to send over what that would look like if you ever want a deeper pass before your next release.
Either way, great work on what you've built so far — wishing you luck with it!
The part that caught my attention wasn't the privacy angle.
It was the idea that the manual step is actually creating some of the value.
A lot of products treat friction as something to remove.
You're treating part of it as something worth preserving.
I'm curious how you'd tell the difference between friction that's helping the habit and friction that's quietly preventing it.