eBudget is a free personal and family budgeting app with a focus on every day use and requiring minimum time to keep your budgeting in check.
It was built out of the need for families, especially with newborn kids, to keep on top of their spending, so they can:
- Always have enough money aside to pay for the essentials.
- Allocate money to and priorities the things that they want (getting your finances line up with your goals and wants).
- Make visible progress for saving towards the bigger goals instead of leaving those to chance.
With a few seconds (let's face it, it's hard to fine time for most things, yet alone budgeting) and a smart phone or web browser you'll forever be able to answer the questions when going to make a purchase, "Can I afford it?", and keep your spending habits in line with what you really want.
I conducted interviews of new parents about money and budgeting. Everyone has different approaches to it, some worked better than others. But they all agreed that they were super busy, and generally found managing money very hard to find time for. When under stress we default to our old ways and don't keep on top of it. There are some scarey and sometimes funny "critical mass" stories of when managing money between couples got out of hand and it results in a huge conflict. It seems to be a turning point for many to look into some kind of budgeting solutions, even if that is as crude as separate bank accounts for bills and spending. But it also seems when life starts putting the pressure on again, the systems and discipline to keep to those systems breaks down. eBudget is meant to keep you on top of it.
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Share your budget, so you and your partner can always be on the same page. Guaranteed to result in less fights about money*. (* Not a real guarantee, but pretty close)
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Private and secure. All the data stays with you!. It is only shared between your devices and web browser and directly with who you share your budget, no-one is evesdropping.(Note: currently it bounces off a relay server, so this isn't entirely true, but you can run your own, or shortly it will be running off holochain, the backend is very simple as the app was built to be decentralised in the first place so you could also roll your own, alternatively data can be easily encrypted end-to-end.)
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Mobile, desktop and web app. Use it on all devices and have it always available everywhere. Also no setup required!, Not even a login.
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Automatic bank transaction downloads. Then you can reconcile against your bank account to make sure your budget is 100% correct. And you can do this in less than a minute a day! (A currently working prototype is in the app. It uses a hidden web browser in the app and connects directly to the bank, secure, direct and no 3rd parties listening in the middle. This can be expanded to work with almost any bank.)
The project is at a MVP stage. It works. It's been in production usage for quite a while without any data loss. So it is safe to use, and any updates are designed to be safe to your data.
The UI is not at production quality (It is modern, it just isn't polished nor intuitive in some places), and quite a few features are in progress and in testing.
The current build is available at https://ebudget.live
The app is written in Ionic 3 and runs as a PWA. It is easy to get started and nice to develop with. Changes are live loaded in the browser. All the scripts are there to build it for web, iOS and Android.
Todo: Developer getting started detailed docs. please bug me for it if you are interested!! I'll put a nice video here of installing everything, developing, building and deploying.
As part of eBudget I want to have some fantastic resources on budgeting and how to budget in different family and incomes situations. The end goal is to have a questionnaire that gets you to a starting point with your initial budget that can be tweaked from there. The idea is to make adoption as frictionless as possible.
For application help, I want an interactive how to guide on how to budget and track different events in the app, and how to use the app. You'll find a JavaScript UI automation kit in the sources which can show live demos and allow the user to interact with it. You can see it in action in the initial starting of the website at https://ebudgetapp.com
I also want to couple all of this with an active and connected community who can help and support each other on their budgeting journey. We want to keep people engaged and budgeting!
eBudget has been in the making for many many years. It's been through a few rewrites and I have spent countless hours planning out features, nutting out design problems, coming up with business plans and dreaming of the possibilities. It's only now the technology to enable what I originally envisioned is finally coming to the world.
I intended for this build of eBudget to be a commercial application, but I think it's best chance of success is in the open source world and be a community based app. So I'm changing my focus from development, to fostering a community.
I think it is quite essential to make this app mainstream friendly and of a commercial quality. Realistically this is only going to happen with some paid core developers.
There are ways to monetarily support developers in an open source ecosystem, so if enough community support builds up around this app, I'd like to pursue some of the options (and I have some ideas for some new options) and compensate developers (and other non-developer contributers) for their support.
If you've read this far and the project sounds interesting, drop me a line, or make sure you give it a star on GitHub. That might be the most valuable contribution to get started!
Get in touch with me if you are keen to give any development a go. I've got tonnes of ideas, notes and designs for features, but it's too much for me to handle alone. The future of this app depends on people like you... And we can all benefit from the improvements.
For hardcore developer chat ping me @ryan on https://chat.holochain.org Or for general chat join the telegram group https://t.me/ebudget