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Show HN: Simple Budgeting

putz.io

61 pointsclintonhalpin44 comments

A little off-topic, but really wondering; am i the only one annoyed by the fact that 9 out of 10 apps these days are:

1. cloud based/harvesting as much data as possible and/or 2. subscriptions

I prefer apps like for example Omnifocus [1], that give you:

1. the ability to client-side encrypt your data so your data won't be sold/misused, and 2. instead of making profit of selling your data, simply let you pay a larger amount upfront for it instead. Thus, you also know exactly what features you're paying for - as opposed to subscriptions...

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnifocus-3/id1346190318?mt=...

When it comes down to ad-based revenue versus subscription-based revenue, I'll choose the subscription (almost) every time. I'd much rather pay (some amount) for a high-quality product than not pay for a subpar product (assuming, as I do, that ads detract from an app's experience in most cases).

I'd also prefer that service be the one "mining" my data (to provide a better service to me) than being a middleman ferrying my data off to advertisers and third parties. Honestly, if the app/service can really make use of my data, I'd usually prefer handing it all over to them so they can do their job better over having some kind of offline experience for the misguided sake of trying to protect my privacy. Give me the option to give you data and show/tell me what you're going to do with it, and I'll happily give it to you 9 out of 10 times.

My ideal price is somewhere between a subscription and a one-off payment for something for most things, with no ads in either and some kind of cloud-based storage/backup/assistance in both. Obviously there's a lot of context left out here like how one-off payments don't work when you're paying server fees each month, etc.

I actually signed up for Standard Note yesterday and have been evaluating Todoist due to those privacy concerns.

My SO and I used Wunderlist for a number of years. After my wife noticed a very unexpected advertisement on Facebook, I read the privacy policy. At that point, I didn't feel comfortable putting even basic groceries in anymore.

https://standardnotes.org/

Standard Notes is great for desktop but on mobile it's not really there yet.

You basically can't format notes at all on mobile and changing a note on mobile for me just borked the desktop formatting.

Will be great all-rounder when that is sorted though.

What does a subscription business model have to do with selling of data? That would be correlated with an ad model.

Presumably if selling the software direct to the consumer then you don't need to monitize off of eyeballs, ie: ads, data-resale

disclaimer: working on something similar to putz but way more sophisticated.

my webapp is cloud (old style webapp, not that much cloud if you ask me) but for the simple reason that I allow users to cooperate (couples, families). I'm going for the subscriptions model because I'd like my customers to be those who actually use the app and not some effing corporation leeching more profits from my users.

I did wonder though about the hyper-sensitive users who prefer running the app and data themselves. To be honest, the answer is to use a different, ideally open source, software like gnucash, ledger/hledger, or beancount (I used the first two myself). which all come with their own limitations.

Would there be a market for me to offer my rails/mongodb/... app as a docker container that you deploy wherever you like? I'd not even bother about DRM.

You might like Buckets: www.budgetwithbuckets.com (I'm the developer)

Nobody wants to pay upfront. This is antithetical to what customers prefer.

You also pay upfront for subscriptions, although there’s usually a trial which is also a thing with non-subscription apps.

You often pay much less upfront for a subscription than you do e.g. purchasing an app "full price".

You might pay more over the lifetime of your subscription than you would paying full price for something, but in terms of your parent's comment, that is why a subscription is seen as preferred over paying for something upfront.

For example, $7/mo is a lot more palatable than buying some software for $80, especially when you're in the stage of "I don't know if I'll use this or not".

Not me. I loved paying $50 for YNAB4 for life. Or I could have say a year of YNAB cloud access for an inferior product.

So you enjoy paying less? Obviously upfront costs need to be vastly lowered in order to get any customers.

Well this is the game being played. If you run a business you don't want customers like me who seek value and privacy. You'll make a lot more money from those with plenty of disposable cash who don't mind adding yet another $10/m SaaS to their monthly expenses.

I thought about creating a budget SaaS but what puts me off is

(i) Your target money is in a budgeting mindframe and so yeah they are going to be looking for the cheapest option.

(ii) There are so many budget apps and they are good and fairly cheap.

YNAB4 is the best as far as I am concerned, unless you need full double-entry accounting. The user interface is superb. It is going to be hard to come close. My ideal budget app is YNAB4 but with some of the opinionated envelope-based budgeting calculations being more flexible for those who do have some cashflow buffer.

I'd literally keep a Windows 10 VM for the next 20 years to run it :-) unless something with a better UI comes out which I doubt.

You're certainly offering a good value but you don't have a good business. I guess you can jump around from app to app but you'll just get outcompeted by people who have better revs and more resources to plow into r&d or distribution.

Really cool! I'm also big into playing around with budget apps and seeing what works.

Few suggestions I have from playing around with it:

1. It's not clear when I click the "add a budget" what it's for. There's the top-level "November 1-15" type of budget and then those budgets have categories, but the terminology could maybe use some work here. The term "budget" to me is usually synonymous with how you're using "categories" - e.g. we have a grocery budget.

2. I wasn't really expecting the ellipsis button to be a delete. I usually expect it to be like a context menu. In general it seems like the ellipsis button does different things in different locations, which is a bit of a bad pattern IMO.

3. There's a few spelling errors, e.g. "ammount" in the "add a budget" overlay

4. It's a bit weird that when you start a new budget it's immediately in the red (color-wise, at least). I feel like $0.00 left to spend should still be in the black.

5. "Track Spending" is only available for the first budget, but you can imagine that I might make next week's budget before this week is over, so it's a bit annoying that there's no "Track Spending" button on the previous budgets. I realize you can still click into the old budget, but still.

6. There's no way to edit expenses in the budget if I mistakenly add a wrong number, or if there is it's very unclear to me.

7. Negative numbers aren't allowed but you can imagine that this would be pretty useful for things like rebates or if I get a refund on something (though this is pretty related to the last item).

Anyway, love the idea for sure! Short-term budgets are pretty helpful and not something that Mint really provides, so excellent idea.

wgerard, you rule, Thanks for the detailed feedback! I fixed a few things this morning, mainly being able to delete expenses and typos for now.

Thanks for sharing.

The homepage doesn't provide enough information to convince the user to register.

I saw a registration form without knowing anything about the service/app/features/prices/benefits.

Same here.

This seems great, but growing up among Yiddish speakers, this word has a very different connotation. Just worth being aware of.

Putz literally means penis but is commonly used to as a pejorative for a foolish man. Then again "git" is British slang with similar usage and we all use that product.

Not just yiddish, it's also common slang in many parts of the US to mean a very stupid or incompetent person. So yeah, terrible branding IMHO

It’s a common swear word in Brazil too

I'm not even Jewish and "putz!" is usually what I shout when I'm driving in heavy traffic.

For all the emphasis we put on design principles and naming conventions, we collectively suck at naming our products.

Then again, maybe that name is genius.

Wait till you learn what this means in Greek :D Hint: definitely NSFW

Is it similar to the word "bro" in mandarin? :P

Yikes.... Quick google search is no good :(

Suggestions:

- a default set of categories would be useful

- I don't always add expenses immediately, so being able to change the date would useful.

- the ... in the overview window prompts you to delete a budget! seems dangerous

- ditto on another comment, there's no way to edit an expense.

- It might be interesting to setup Income and then allocate budgets based on % of income to automatically calculate budget targets.

Nice work.

What percentage of people have the discipline to use this app, but lack financial discipline?

Website: "You want new clothes, an iced coffee, but does it fit your budget?"

Oh the irony if the user were to get ads for new clothes and iced coffee...

Extra points if you spill that coffee on your new clothes

I have an addiction to trying out budgeting apps the moment I find a new one. It's like the search for the Holy Grail or something. I know that an app by itself isn't going to magically make budgeting a success, instead I see these them as sort of a financial sidekick, something that helps me out get out of my own way just enough so we can save the day (literally ).

The description is accurate. Putz is the simplest of budget trackers. Categories / Expenses and a progress bar. Nice. Fun to play with but won't unseat my current toolset.

What's your current toolset?

Combination spreadsheet and YNAB.

> Combination spreadsheet

I'm curious about that, never heard of it. Can you elaborate or if you have a spreadsheet to share, my address is thomas@budget-fox.com (yes, I'm working on a household budget app)

How do you measure "success" in your budgeting? Is it a short-term monthly basis or a longer one?

A simple Privacy Policy would be appreciated, since this counts as a financial application for many.

I've gone through a few applications/services like this - YNAB, Mint, and a handful of Mac App Store applications that tried to accomplish more or less the same thing. They all requested some sort of subscription or hit me with ads every chance they got. Auto-import features usually end up being lack-luster for me as well, forcing me to log in every time or something along those lines.

I've come to realize that for the gainfully employed, above-average computer user, Excel/Numbers/LibreOffce (but mostly Excel because of PivotTables) is probably the way to go for a few reasons:

- You're looking for a post-mortem/retrospective on your spending as a way to adjust habits accordingly, not a way to pay off huge debts (YNAB is actually quite good for this latter part, but that's not what I'm looking to do)

- You don't want some program's buggy workflows getting in your way when the data is /right there/ and basically just a table of CSV values

- You want custom reports, charts, and other things

- It's just really not that hard. Any bank will allow you to export financial data in CSV or a similar format.

I just export my data every month and do a post-mortem. Easy enough. No extra cost.

Are you the primary spender in your household or is it a team effort? I've found that what helps me may not help her due to different upbringings and mindsets about money.

I agree with you that the CSV the primary valuable artifact. Most of the pie charts and such don't add any value. The real opportunity to improve lies in the thought process I face at each individual spending decision.

Let me be frank here: The app is too simple, unpolished and I don't think you've used it for yourself long enough. Here's my list of complaints, please know that I'm working on a similar app with a lot more features:

* no way to copy a budget (it's the same categories every month!) * colour scheme isn't that great (lack of contrast, but that might be me) * only $, no € or ¥. currency is a text-field! * no date on the stuff I spent, sure I could use the Note field but it's cool enough * can't "end" a budget prematurely. sure, there's "custom" but no big phat arrow pointing me at the same default which is "1st of this month to the end of this month". * can't do negative amounts. yes, I'd like to do that * having upcoming or past budgets feels weird, the blue (why blue?) "Track spending" button only shows for the oldest one. * no reports at all

Expense tracking seems to be a trend recently! I myself use HelloExpense [1] (just a happy user) and I recently developed a small tool to analyse my expenses. It handles a simple csv format (from the hello expense export, but could be generalised). I thought I might share it in this thread. If people are interested, I put a demo at https://expenses-analysis.herokuapp.com/

About your website: I would have liked to get info without registering. The explanation is short, and the only links are to sign up or sign in.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.helloexpen...

Reminds me of https://www.simple.com/features/expenses

I recently started using this and love it. It may sound silly, but I've found that the most effective way to stick to my budget is using a checking account for expenses that is separate from my direct-deposit account. Simple tells you how much money you have left (that isn't earmarked for something else), and that's it.

Was just gonna say that. Been a simple user since 2012 and it absolutely helped me make solid financial decisions.

I'm starting to feel I've "outgrown" it, but it's been literally my hub since 2012.

I also use Personal Capital, but Simple's new protected goal isn't exposed there, so I just... stopped using it.

Good job on shipping something but I have to say that this space is soon going to be owned by the banking services who have the data on the category of your spending. And most importantly, requires no data input from myself.

Revolut already does it, so does my bank.

Great name.

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