Budgeting apps you buy once instead of subscribing
A budget is a tool for spending less. Paying a yearly subscription for one is an awkward place to start, and it is the complaint underneath a great many of the angry reviews of the well-known budgeting apps. Here is what the subscription is actually paying for, and when a one-time purchase is the better deal.
What the subscription pays for
Three things, mostly: the bank-sync data provider, which charges per connected account every month; the servers that hold your budget; and continuous development.
That is a real cost and a defensible model — as long as you are getting all three. If the bank connection does not work in your country, you are paying the ongoing cost of a service you are not receiving, and the app on your screen is doing a job a spreadsheet could do offline.
What a one-time purchase can and cannot include
A one-off payment works when the software does not have a per-user running cost. An app that keeps your budget on your own machine has almost none: no per-account data fees, no storage, no sync servers.
What a one-off cannot honestly promise is unlimited future work for free. The fair version is what it says on the tin: you buy the app, you keep the app, and later versions of the same app are included — not a promise that somebody will maintain it forever at their own expense.
Be suspicious of the opposite trick too: a one-time purchase that turns out to unlock a crippled version, with the useful part behind a second payment.
Questions worth asking before you pay anything
· Does the free version actually work, or is it a demo shaped like a product?
· If you stop paying, do you keep your data in a form you can use?
· Is the price per person or per household?
· Does the app need an account at all, and if so, why?
· What happens to the budget if the company disappears?
An app that keeps a plain file on your own disk answers the last two comfortably. An app that keeps your budget on a server has to be trusted for both.
Where handbudget sits
handbudget is free, and it is the whole app in both editions — envelopes, transactions, months, import and export, in the browser and as a native app for Windows and Linux. It is not a trial and nothing is held back behind a payment.
That is possible because of the answer above: handbudget has no bank connections and no servers holding budgets, so there is no per-user cost to pass on to anybody. It costs nothing to run beyond being on a server, so it costs nothing to use.
If you want to chip in anyway there is a pay-what-you-want button on the front page. Free is the normal choice, and it stays the normal choice.
Frequently asked questions
Is a free budgeting app going to sell my data?
It is the right question to ask of any free product. handbudget's browser edition never sends your budget anywhere — it is stored in your browser, and there is no account, so there is nothing to sell or to lose in a breach.
What does handbudget cost?
Nothing, in either edition. There is no trial, no account and no upgrade — the front page has a pay-what-you-want button for anyone who wants to support it, and ignoring it is the expected thing to do.
Will it turn into a subscription later?
It has no running cost to justify one. handbudget holds no budgets on a server and connects to no bank, so the bill it would be recovering does not exist.
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