It's free.
Not free-for-30-days. Not free-until-you-need-the-good-bit. Every feature Budget by Hand has — including end-to-end encryption and offline mode — is free, and stays free. No credit card, no trial, no bank login.
Why are you paying a subscription to an app whose entire job is to help you spend less?
It is a strange deal when you say it out loud. The budgeting apps people recommend cost somewhere between a few euros a month and a hundred-odd a year. If you are here because money is tight, the tool for fixing that has just become another line in the very problem you came to fix — and one you have to remember to cancel.
The shame is the bigger obstacle anyway. Most people who need a budget already feel behind, and being asked to pay to feel less behind is a good reason to close the tab and try again next month. So there is no card field anywhere in this app, and nothing to decide before you start.
You should be spending less by the end of the month, not more. That is the whole point, and charging you a subscription for it never made sense to us.
What that includes
All of it. There is no locked tier to compare this against.
- Unlimited transactions, categories and months
- Your full history and full-year view
- End-to-end encryption, with keys only you hold
- Offline mode on Android — your budget stays on the phone
- Receipt scanning on Android, and CSV import everywhere
- Unlimited savings goals
- A dashboard you can rearrange, and themes
- Export everything, any time, in one file
- Installs to your phone, and works with no signal
- No bank logins — ever
This page used to promise nothing would ever be locked
That promise is easy to make and easy to quietly walk back, so here is the receipt. Two features were built behind a paid tier: keeping your budget entirely on your own device, and end-to-end encryption so that even we cannot read it.
Both are now free, for everyone. The tier was not repriced or grandfathered — it was deleted, along with the payment code that would have charged for it. Nothing was taken away to make room for it, and nothing was added to a plan you would have to buy.
The promise did not just survive the change. It got bigger.
So how does it stay free?
Fair question — it's the one you should ask any free finance app.
Mostly because it is genuinely cheap to run. Budget by Hand is a set of static files and a database — there are no servers of our own, no bank-sync provider charging per user, and no staff. The bill is a domain and a hosting plan, which makes keeping it free a decision rather than a sacrifice.
What we will never do is make money from you instead of from a product:
- Never sell, rent or share your data.
- Never run ads or ad-tracking.
- Never ask for your bank login — the app cannot touch your accounts.
- Never put a feature you already had behind a payment.
If a way to support the project ever appears, it will be voluntary, it will be off to one side, and it will not change a single thing about the app for anyone who ignores it.
Questions people ask
- Is it really free? What’s the catch?
- It's genuinely free — there's no card to enter and nothing is locked. The catch, if you want to call it one, is that you type your spending in yourself. Budget by Hand doesn't connect to your bank, so there's no data to sell and no subscription paying for a sync service.
- Will you start charging me later?
- No. There is no paid tier and none planned — the one that existed was deleted, and the two features behind it (offline mode and end-to-end encryption) are now free for everyone. If a way to support the project ever appears it will be voluntary and it will not lock anything.
- Do I need to give you a credit card?
- No. There is no card field anywhere in the app, and no trial to forget to cancel. You sign in and start.
- Is the encryption really free too?
- Yes, and it is real end-to-end encryption: your budget is encrypted on your device before it is saved, so our server only ever holds ciphertext it cannot read. The trade-off is that we cannot recover your passphrase either — you get ten backup codes, and you should keep an exported backup. Being signed in still contacts Google to keep your session alive, so this protects your budget data, not the fact that you have an account.
- How do you pay for the servers then?
- The app is small and cheap to run — it is static files plus a database, with no servers of our own. At this size the hosting bill is a few euros a month, which is worth it to get the product in front of people.
- What happens to my data if you shut down?
- You can export everything — profile, categories, goals and every transaction — to a single file from Settings, any time, without asking us. Your data was never locked in.