Show HN: I build a cross-platform zero-based budgeting app: InstaBudget | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I build a cross-platform zero-based budgeting app: InstaBudget

instabudget.app

6 pointspoitch14 comments

Hi, I've been working on the side for many months on a zero-based budgeting application. I am a team of one and learned many new technologies along the way to build this project:

* Django Backend

* React + Bootstrap in Typescript for the web frontend

* Flutter in Dart for the mobile applications.

* It is running on Digital Ocean with a Postgres database.

InstaBudget is a personal finance tool to budget and track expenses. It's using zero-based budgeting, aka envelope budgeting, methodology.

It supports: * auto-importing transactions from banks thanks to Plaid

* automatically categorizing transactions

* multi-currency

I was a YNAB user for a long time but never liked the latest version, so "naturally" decided I could build something myself.

This looks nice, and 10 bucks a month may be OK for many US based people in your target market, but I feel that you are scaring away many potential users by only giving them 14 days to evaluate, which is really not much considering that everyone is busy doing everything else in their lives. Have you thought about adding a permanently free option, or at least giving people several months? The free account can be quite limited in terms of functionality but at least you are giving people more breathing room to test it out before they have to decide.

(This is just an opinion from an outsider. Personally, I have an aversion against anything hosted by third parties, so I am not in your target market anyway.)

Thank you for the feedback.

Interestingly enough I did have a free option before.

As you pointed out, the feature set in the free version felt so limiting and it added a lot of complexity in the application itself as well that I decided to get rid of it. There is also the school of thought about how paying customers are important to validate the idea compared to customers not paying.

I hesitated a while on the duration of the free trial period and you're right 14 days is probably too short to really evaluate a budgeting solution. A budget takes time tailoring anyway.

Pricing was mostly done based on competition, it's difficult to gauge the actual cost per user without any users other than myself. I'm forecasting the main cost to be on Plaid (though right now that'd be for US and CA only)

Out of curiosity, do you use a self-hosted or desktop personal finance solution? If so which one?

This is definitely something I loved about desktop YNAB.

Good job getting the release out the door.

Thank you.

Looks nice and I've been looking for something similar, although as another person has said $9.99 per month is fairly steep compared to bigger names that do "similar". I also use a zero-based app that costs ~$4-5 per month.

Might be good for an "early adopters" type of thing. Otherwise looks nice overall and congrats. :-)

Tough crowd selling to people looking to cut back I reckon! But I think budget apps are ripe for some breakthrough but the problems to be solved are more wetware issues.

From your perspective, what do you feel are those issues?

Budget software seems to be based on this idea that you can perfectly allocate all your spending to categories. The more complex your life e.g. partner, kids, owning cars etc. the more unpredictable things become. And I think the core of it is developing habits > elaborate software that takes time to manage and keep balanced etc.

Thank you. Pricing is an art form for sure. I'll look into doing an early adopter pricing.

Doing it cross-platform is interesting to say the least :)

How do you plan to compete with lunchmoney.app?

Jen is an IndieHacker. I'm a big fan of lunchmoney, and I'm rooting for the success of the app.

We pretty much have feature parity at this point. The small differences are that InstaBudget has mobile apps and lunchmoney has reports (there are other small differences). Both of those are easy gap to fill.

That being said, the major differentiator is that InstaBudget is based on zero-based budgeting whereas lunchmoney has "soft" budgeting.

So in a way we're not competing for the same users.

So excited for this!

Thank you.

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