No card, no trial, no catch
It's free.
Not free-for-30-days. Not free-until-you-need-the-good-bit. Every feature Budget by Hand has today is free, and stays free — no credit card, no account juggling, no bank login.
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
- Receipt scanning and CSV import
- Unlimited savings goals
- A dashboard you can rearrange, and themes
- Works offline, installs to your phone
- Export everything, any time, in one file
- No bank logins — ever
So how will you make money?
Fair question — it's the one you should ask any free finance app.
Eventually, by selling optional extras — things like sharing a budget with a partner, or letting a photo of a receipt fill itself in. New things, on top. Everything the app does today stays free, for everyone, including you.
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 take away something you already had.
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?
- Not for anything you can do today. If a paid tier arrives it will be for new, optional extras built on top — like sharing a budget with a partner. Everything currently in the app stays free for everyone who is already using it.
- 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.
- 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.