Free budget tracker apps: what the word free is doing
Search for a free budget tracker app and you will get a long list, most of which is not free in the way you meant. It is worth two minutes to learn the four shapes, because the cost of picking wrong is not money — it is moving your whole budget twice.
The four kinds of free
Free trial. The whole app, for a few weeks, then a subscription. Useful for deciding, useless for keeping.
Free tier. A real free version with limits — a cap on categories, accounts, or how much history you can see. Workable if the limits are above what you need, miserable if you grow into them.
Free because you are the product. No subscription, but the app wants your bank login or sells anonymised spending data. For a budget, that is a strange trade: the whole file is a list of everything you do.
Free because it costs nothing to run. No bank connections, no servers holding your budget, so there is no monthly bill to recover. This is the only one with nothing waiting to happen.
How to tell which one you have in front of you
· Look for the price page. If it exists and the free column has a footnote, it is a free tier.
· Look for what happens to your data if you stop. If the answer is "it stays on our servers", the free is a tier and the leverage is theirs.
· Look for the bank connection. That costs the maker money per account per month, and that money comes from somewhere.
· Look for an export button before you need it. An app confident in its free is relaxed about letting you leave.
What manual entry has to do with it
Almost every running cost in a budgeting app comes from the bank connection: a data provider charges per linked account, every month, forever. Drop it and the economics change completely — there is no per-person cost left to pay for.
That is the trade a manual budget makes. You type in what you spent, which takes a few minutes a week; in exchange nothing has to be charged, nothing has to be uploaded, and nothing about the app has to change when somebody's budget gets big.
Where handbudget sits
handbudget is the fourth kind. There is no bank connection for anyone, no account to make, and no server holding budgets — the browser edition keeps everything in your own browser and the desktop app keeps a plain file on your disk.
Everything is included: unlimited envelopes, unlimited transactions, every month, import and export. There is no paid tier to be nudged towards, because there is no paid tier.
If you are arriving from a budgeting subscription, the Settings screen imports a YNAB CSV export, so the history you already typed comes with you.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free forever, or free for now?
There is no running cost behind it to recover later: no bank-sync provider, no servers holding budgets. A price would have to be invented rather than passed on.
What is the catch?
Manual entry. Nothing is imported from your bank, because there is no bank connection at all — you type transactions in, a few minutes a week. For people whose bank never connected anyway, that is not a catch.
Do I need an account?
No. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to sign in to. Your budget lives in your browser or in a file on your own disk.