[zifnab06]

I’ve looked at a lot of budgeting apps. In order of priority, I want:

1. Don’t be evil (aka don’t be intuit)

2. Web based with some sane security (2fa, encryption at rest, etc)

3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank.

4. Budgeting/reporting.

5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it?

6. Sane APIs.

No one I’ve been able to find has been able to do all 6 of these.

[ben509]

> 4. Budgeting/reporting.

> 5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it?

I work on a methodology engine and have implemented both of these, at least on the data side, and they are essentially aspects of the same thing.

Fundamentally, what's hard is user trust. If they see numbers that don't make sense, explaining that "technically you told us this and this which all adds up to that" sounds like "we can't do arithemtic" to users.

The budget needs to agree with the forecasts. And the forecast doesn't quite semantically "fit" the budget; your forecast shouldn't "know" about the future or it can't give faithful metrics whereas your budget is supposed to plan ahead.

It also gets tricky when people use the damned thing, because your system needs to be resilient to users not doing the things they promised to do. For example, if they promise to deposit $500 in projected account A, but instead deposit it in tracked account B, you would project that the money lands in A, and also report that there's $500 more in B. So now those totals are off.

And budgeting itself is a surprisingly tricky problem. There are so many techniques to make a budget work that selecting good ones is hard. And users will say, "oh, I always want to spend $500 on this," and when that results in something stupid, "well, obviously not then." Even without that, it's hard to make the budget not do weird stuff that gives a user a WTF moment. The most counter-intuitive stuff tends to happen when the person is running low on funds, but that's also the raison d'etre of a budget.

> 3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank.

> 6. Sane APIs.

Between not making money off the APIs, having the user get frustrated being bounced between my support and the competitor, and that the APIs become another component that must be secured and administered, I'm not surprised APIs are uncommon.

Which makes me sad.

[shashank]

I'm the founder of Buxfer (https://www.buxfer.com)

Forecasting is one of the strongest aspects of our product. We also provide alerts ahead of time if we can predict your account balance will fall below zero (or whatever threshold you configure). Forecasting can also be used to preview your expenses/income/cashflow for the upcoming months / years.

We do have an API, but I admit it's not the best around. Other than that, our product does all the 6 things you point out.

Happy to hear more feedback at [e-mail]

[iudqnolq]

I like your privacy policy. It's reasonably easy to read, has a nice chart, and makes nice sounding promises.

Why don't you link to it from your home page? I had to do a Google site search to find it. (And maybe even put the 'what we share' chart somewhere more prominent)

[mcphage]

What do y'all use for aggregation? CashEdge, Plaid, something else entirely?

[jnfr]

Founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) here– I encourage you to check us out! We've got everything you're looking for except for #5 (forecasting) and our developer API is nearing completion and we'll be beta-testing that soon!

[kposehn]

#5 is so critical. If you can’t enter transactions ahead of time and know where you will be, then what is the point?

[dsd]

7. auto-categorization