Why I Built Budgetpeer
I tracked my budget in Google Sheets for years. It worked - kind of. I had my categories, my formulas, my color-coded cells. But every time I sat down to log a transaction, the same friction hit me. Open the spreadsheet. Find the right row. Type the amount. Hope I didn't break a formula. No charts unless I built them myself. No insights unless I squinted at rows of numbers.
I wanted something faster. Something where I could add a transaction in a few seconds, see a real dashboard, and actually understand where my money was going - without wrestling with a spreadsheet every time.
So I started looking at what was out there.
The options weren't great:
Most budget apps wanted my bank login before I could even try them. Services like Plaid would get access to my full transaction history, account balances, and personal financial data - just to use a budget tracker. That felt like too much.
The apps that did respect privacy were either too basic or too expensive. YNAB costs $109 a year. Monarch is $99. For a tool I'd use every day, I didn't want another subscription eating into the budget I was trying to manage.
And then there was the BNPL problem.
The gap no one was filling:
During my research, I noticed something that surprised me: not a single budget app properly handles Buy Now Pay Later payments. Over 100 million people in North America use Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, or similar services. When you buy something for $200 on Klarna, your budget sees $50 this month - and the remaining $150 hits across the next three months, invisible and unplanned.
No app was solving this. Not YNAB. Not Monarch. Not Goodbudget. Not even the fancy ones with bank connections.
That's when I decided to build Budgetpeer.
Budgetpeer is a manual budget tracker built for people who want control without complexity. You add your transactions, you see your dashboard, you understand your spending. No bank login. No subscription. No spreadsheet formulas.
And it's the only budget app that automatically splits your BNPL payments across the months they're actually due - so your budget reflects reality, not just what's in front of you today.
I built it as a solo founder, working on it alongside my day job. Every feature exists because I needed it or because research showed real people were asking for it. There's no venture capital, no growth-at-all-costs pressure, no reason to harvest your data. Just a tool that does what it says.
The Details:
Free forever with generous limits, or $49 one-time for unlimited everything
No bank connection required - ever
Works on any device (phone, tablet, desktop)
BNPL auto-splitting for Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, and any other installment service
Supports 100+ currencies
If you've been managing your budget in a spreadsheet and wishing it was just a little bit better - that's exactly who I built this for.
