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Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses (apps.apple.com)

55 points by Nyoxide ↗ HN
My Expenses is a very simple app to track expenses for one-time budgets.

Let's say you're going on vacations in Italy and you want to allocate $1.500 to this trip. You create a budget "Italy" in 30 seconds and you're ready to go. Each time you make an expense in Italy, you add it to the app in a few seconds and you instantly know you're remaining budget.

I'm bored of super complex apps. Yes, they do a lot of things, but it often takes a while to get used to the app and understand all its features.

That's why I created this app. I want people to be able to track their expenses in seconds, as quickly and simply as possible.

It's available on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

65 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] thread
ExpeditKallax
This looks nice. Unfortunately, I don't have and of the Apple devices so I can't use it.

Can you tell a little bit more how long did it take you to build this app?

Nyoxide
Thank you very much ! Oh, that's a shame. I hope it'll one day be available on Android too.

I've started thinking about this app a few month ago (around October 2022). It took me a lot of time to iterate on design and improve it, plus I was working on others projects at the same time. I've got my final design around January 2023 and I've work intensively for ~1 month. Then I released it and started working on improvements, new features etc. I'm now satisfied with the available version, that's why I'm starting to share it :)

quickthrower2
Thanks I might try this. I gave up on budgeting a while ago trying to account for every cent in a double entry kinda way. However perfect is the enemy of good and I am up for trying a simpler budget approach.
Nyoxide
I really hope it will help you ! Keep me up to date and tell me if you have any feedback :)
codazoda
Here’s my favorite trick…

Setup a “bills” account for your recurring expenses like loan payments, housing, utilities, and recurring entertainment.

Ask your employer to automatically deposit the amount to cover those into that account. Setup your transactions to come out of that account. Now you can ignore these expenses. Adjust as needed.

Put the rest of your money in a “fun” account. Use this one for all your other discretionary spending.

Best thing I ever did to stop thinking about my money so much.

ImKevinArcher
Seems good, I will try to find time to give it a try and see how it will help me in real life.
Nyoxide
I'm glad you'll try, hope it will help you !
toyg
Well, good luck to you but you're competing in a very crowded field. Disconnected expense-tracking apps are just one step under Todo apps, in terms of number of alternatives... And most users just don't stick with them, because manually tracking every transaction is exhausting.

When you'll start thinking about adding automated bank fees, which is the necessary progression of the concept, then you'll discover why there are so few "connected" versions compared to the plethora of disconnected ones.

Nyoxide
Yes, that is very complicated to make its place in this kind of app but I've already made an app in another (way less, but still) crowded field and it's now one of most downloaded in certain countries, with more than 1 million downloads. So why not, we have to try to see the result !

And yes, you're right, adding expenses manually is exhausting, but you don't have to worry about your data. Linking a bank account is huge ! Also, adding an online part make the app way more complex. As I really want my apps to be as easy and quick to use as possible, it would not match.

rentpeek
This is a super important point. I'm a super analytical person and have spreadsheets for most important things in my life. So a real outlier in terms of recording data. And STILL i find it hard to keep up with my manual budgeting app that I have.

Integration is super important and imo, the real opportunity is improving the auto-tagging and sorting functionality. Mint for example is pretty terrible at handling things like venmo or one-off transactions

ftio
This looks great, but expense tracker apps are challenging for me to adopt. Either they ask to connect to my bank, or they ask me to manually enter my expenses.

Neither of these is at all appealing to me.

First, I have no idea who the developers are or what their incentives are. I do not hand over access to my bank accounts lightly. No bank connections. I also don't have the patience to track every single purchase manually. It's really disruptive.

If you can solve both of those, I'd consider adopting. Till then, good luck!

wfg
>Either they ask to connect to my bank, or they ask me to manually enter my expenses.

What other options are there?

ohmahjong
I think scanning receipts (which still requires manual effort) or parsing bank SMSes locally could work
ftio
If I had a great idea, I'd build it. I do think if you could reduce the friction of adding a transaction to very, very low (maybe adding a transaction through a combination of voice and location-awareness?), I'd consider giving it a shot.

It's a tall wall to climb, and there isn't an obvious ladder lying around.

Nyoxide
Thank you very much for sharing your ideas !
mcjiggerlog
The alternative that I use is to use GnuCash and periodically download CSVs from my bank of my transactions. That way I don't have to manually enter transactions and don't have to give my bank login to some random third party.

All that's needed is about 15-30 minutes every couple of months to bring in the latest transactions and double check the categorizations. GnuCash uses double entry bookkeeping, so you always know if your data is accurate or not by being able to reconcile the accounts.

iffycan
You can record a macro to go download transactions from your bank.
garborg
I'd use an website/app that supports my preferred data ingestion process -- periodically manually downloading my bank & credit transactions (supporting at least one of: csv, qif, and qfx), and allows me to define at least (account, category, description) tuples mapping transaction to buckets (ideally hierarchical).

(Ideally also a focus on viewing trends at various grains and easy drill down, as opposed to "don't buy any more smoothies for the next 11 days, but go ahead and rent more movies soon -- use it or lose it!".)

I see gnucash mentioned as an option for ingesting downloaded transactions. Any others?

garborg
lunchmoney, recommended in another comment, ticks a lot of boxes for me and supports uploading downloaded transactions.
NoboruWataya
I believe the various plain text accounting tools (ledger, hledger, beancount) have tools that allow for this. I haven't used them as I use gnucash but they may be worth a look.
Nyoxide
You're totally right, I can't imagine giving access to my bank accounts either. That's why I chose to manually enter the expenses. Yes, you have to think about it every time, but I bet on the fact that it takes only a few seconds to add an expense in my app.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to find a better solution yet but maybe one day we'll find one !

st0le
I had this idea to basically have the Budgeting app look at the notifications on my phone or emails from the bank to parse the transactions details automatically.

On iOS if an app exposes a Shortcut, I could setup a Shortcut Automation to automatically add an expense when a new email from my bank shows up. Would need some REGEX or LLM ;)

Nyoxide
Great idea ! Would need some investigation but should be doable
mackrevinack
you can do this with tasker on android. read whatever text is in the notification and then use the http command to send on the information if theres an API, or even use the autoinput plugin to open the app and tap on certain elements, but thats kind of messy
emehex
63.5MB? Why so big?!
codazoda
Are you joking?

iOS apps are big. I checked my top 10 results for “budgeting” in the store and this app is smaller than half of those.

It does strike me as odd that apps are so big these days, but this one isn’t particularly large.

Nyoxide
To be honest there's nothing special in the code or whatever. Almost all the apps I worked on are at least 50MB so it does not surprise me.

The smallest one I've worked on is a 2 screens app, 100% offline, without any third-library, without in-app purchases and without onboarding etc so it's clearly the less you can do and it's still almost 20MB.

palavrov
Looks nice but too aggressively asks for monthly subscription ($10/month).
Nyoxide
Hey, thank you for your feedback ! I'm currently testing different prices in order to determine what is the best for everyone. Spoiler: It won't be the $9.99/month haha
patrickwalton
The design is surprising similar to Qubemoney.com's app, which is incredible and is bank and envelope budgeting in one.
Nyoxide
Wowww that's interesting, I didn't even know this app ! Banking is clearly another level, I would never try to do that haha
jmathai
Congrats on the launch.

I don’t know how folks manage to consistently budget if they have to enter transactions manually.

After trying a bunch of overly complex budgeting apps like ynab - I wrote one for my wife and I (it used to be open for others). https://fiers.co/features/spend

I’m using a developer plaid account (free) to download transactions. Works pretty well - we are goin on 4 years of budgeting and it’s been great.

Nyoxide
Congrats, it looks nice !
speg
That’s awesome. One of our New Year’s resolutions was to track our expenses and budget better this year so after making a spreadsheet in January, I wrote a simple Django app last week to import our transactions and start categorizing them. Perhaps I should’ve done a bit more market research, and looked into things like this!
wingerlang
The frontpage isn't really clear. Not sure what the red circles have to do with the text. The screenshots barely show anything, and I am inclined to believe the app is more of a financial independence calculator than expense tracker? Sure there is some overlap but I'm still confused.
jmathai
There's a financial independence forecast that is separate from the budgeting app. The site is more focused on the forecast tool.

What I came to learn was that the forecast was predicated on having a predictable outflow of expenses which is what led us to start budgeting - hence the app, after a bit of research [1].

[1] https://fiers.co/article/building-a-simple-budgeting-tool-as...

mackrevinack
does ynab still make you enter things manually? i think i remember reading some ynab blog posts years ago where they were implying that they kept it manual by design so that you would be taking a more active role in your budgeting every day, compared to something that added everything automatically. it makes sense but it could have also just been an excuse at the time because its complicated to add support for that type of thing
earthling8118
They have automatic input now for sure, but I believe it is only through plaid. I couldn't find a list but there are banks that can talk with plaid without requiring you give them your password and it works well enough.

Without automatic input it would be much less worth it. Sure, mindfulness and all. But that's a lot of effort to do. When you use the automatic one it can even sort the categories in most cases by matching the last category used for that store

vxNsr
YNAB supports auto imports. They use both Plaid and MX. Initially they only used MX, but then for whatever reason there was a point where they were trying to drop MX but they gave up when plaid proved to be more (or just as) unreliable, now they use both. Each user is only supposed to use one or the other. You don’t get to choose they assign it to you randomly when you sign up, you’ll know based on the UI which you got. If a specific bank is having trouble connecting, support can manually set that bank for that user to be through the other service, I’ve had to do this a few times. Their support is stellar, still I wish banks provided better APIs.

They’ve raised their prices recently which got a lot of people very upset. A few went off on their own to create a new budgeting app, but since then most of those efforts died due to the giant undertaking it is as mentioned upthread. I don’t think any of those efforts made it to the auto import stage.

bg0
FWIW, I know this is a simple app and all but the biggest pain I've ever found in expense tracking is no one supports multi currencies. I have literally one option to track expenses in CAD and USD.
Nyoxide
That's a very good feedback, thank you very much ! I'll check if it's possible to switch currency without adding complexity for mono currency users.
lhoff
I can recommend Splid[1]. Very easy to use, low effort expense tracking app that supports shared tracking without any signup or the need of an account. Supports Multi-Currency.

[1]https://splid.app/english

graeme
Try Lunch Money. Great multi currency support.

https://lunchmoney.app/

It doesn’t work for my brain but ynab also supports multicurrency.

bg0
That's what I use but their bank connections are so hit or miss and they always blame it plaid which is not the case.

I'll give YNAB a go

vxNsr
As far as I know YNAB doesn’t support multi currency out of the box. There does appear to be a “blessed” 3rd party plugin so you could try that.
2143
Nice app. Good luck.

I use a spreadsheet tailored exactly to my situation.

It's not exactly for "budgeting" but it's more of a general purpose expense tracker.

It started out simple, but it's now got categories, tracks various bank accounts, investments, gives me useful data for my tax calculations etc. Graphing is built-in. Building new features for new use cases hasn't been too hard so far.

And I have hooked up to it other scripts to do periodic cleanups, parse emails and populate data etc.

(by the way, spreadsheet apps have a high power to weight ratio).

Nyoxide
Thank you for the support !

Your spreadsheet seems really interesting, I would have been very curious to see what it looks like. That's a shame it contains your personal data haha

tikkun
> (by the way, spreadsheet apps have a high power to weight ratio).

What do you mean by that?

s_k_
Could you please share your spreadsheet? (without your personal data obviously:)
m3kw9
Same here, takes a bit of work but it can be exactly what you want if you are interested in excel formulas. They are pretty powerful
m3kw9
Takes balls/confidence or just plain ignorance of competition to do just another simple budgeting app!

Is a good looking app!

Nyoxide
You're right, but as explain in another comment, I've already did it once in another field, so why not ? The only way to succeed is by trying :)
pomatic
Re. "disconnected apps": we need a "me-bus (tm)". Any events that relate to "me" should be published, and whatever apps I choose should be able to consume those events. Utilities, banks, home automation... Perhaps even doctors test results... the list is endless. Democratise the data! The potential is huge!
rathish_g
Congratulations on the launch. Manual entry is very tricky.

I use an app from Microsoft called SMS Organizer. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/sms-organize... It scans my SMS and nicely categorizes all my transactions.

Axios (previously Walnut) also does the job well, but it's very cluttered after the latest update. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.daamitt.wa...

Not sure if these apps are globally available.

Nyoxide
Thanks for sharing, will take a look !
hdevel
Can i export a budget data?
Nyoxide
Unfortunately this isn't currently possible but this is on the app's TODO list. Do you have any idea of how you would like to export them ? How it would look like ?
hdevel
So far, I am liking this application although i have been using it for the last 4 days. So, My ideas are either to have an endpoint where you can GET the exported data as xml or csv, you authenticate using a token generated in the application per client. OR to just to have an export button per budget what exports the whole expenses within the budget as csv file.
Nyoxide
Thank you very much for the feedback and the idea. I will work on this
koinedad
Looks really clean I love the idea. Did you do this in SwiftUI/Native?
Nyoxide
Thanks that's kind of you ! The app is made in Swift, I've only used SwiftUI for the homescreen and lockscreen widgets :)
natalia-a
Manual tracking IMHO is just too tedious to succeed. It needs to get integrated into banks and credit card accounts, like Mint, and support automatic categorization. Although all the apps are tried are really bad at this, it's a very hard problem to solve.