The budget app you type into yourself
Your bank was never going to connect anyway. handbudget is built around entering transactions by hand — envelopes, one month at a time, every number kept on your own machine. Free, in the browser and on your desktop.
No account. Nothing to sign up for. Nothing to cancel.
In plain words: a free budget tracker app built for manual expense tracking. Zero-based, envelope-style, and it never asks for your bank login — because it has nowhere to send it.
Want to support handbudget?
Everything here is free, and that is completely fine. It costs us nothing beyond being on our server, so it costs you nothing.
Want to chip in anyway? It goes straight to keeping these tools free for everyone. Pick an amount, or write your own.
Why this exists
Budgeting software is sold on automatic bank sync. Outside the United States and the United Kingdom that feature mostly does not work — banks in Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Denmark are not on the list, or they fall off it after an update. The subscription price stays the same. So households pay every year for automation they never receive, and type in every transaction by hand regardless. That is the complaint underneath a great many of the one-star reviews of the big budgeting apps: the price of a service, the labour of a spreadsheet. handbudget starts from the other end. Manual entry is the design, not the fallback — so the typing is the part that had to be fast.
How it works
Type in what you spent
Date, who you paid, how much, which envelope. The form keeps the account you used last, so a week of receipts takes a few minutes.
Give every amount an envelope
Rent, groceries, the car, the buffer. Assign money to each envelope at the start of the month and watch what is left as the month goes.
See what is left
Leftovers roll into next month on their own. An envelope that goes short says so, in red, and nothing else competes for your attention.
What it costs
In the browser
The whole app: envelopes, transactions, months, import and export. No account, no trial, nothing held back. Your budget is saved in this browser and is never sent anywhere.
Open your budgetOn your machine
The same budget as a native app for Windows and Linux, keeping a plain file on your own disk. Download it and it is yours — there is nothing to buy and nothing to renew.
What you getFree, and not the kind of free that is waiting to become something else: handbudget has no bank connections and no servers holding budgets, so it costs us nothing beyond being on our server — which is why it costs you nothing.
Where your numbers live
· The browser edition keeps everything in this browser's own storage. It is never uploaded, and we could not read it if we wanted to.
· The desktop edition keeps one plain JSON file on your disk. Open it, copy it, back it up, move it to another computer — it is yours.
· Both editions read and write the same file, so you can start in the browser and carry on in the app.
Guides
Short, concrete answers to the questions people ask when their budgeting app stops being worth what it charges.
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