poitch

From your perspective, what do you feel are those issues?

Thank you. Pricing is an art form for sure. I'll look into doing an early adopter pricing.

Doing it cross-platform is interesting to say the least :)

Thank you.

Jen is an IndieHacker. I'm a big fan of lunchmoney, and I'm rooting for the success of the app.

We pretty much have feature parity at this point. The small differences are that InstaBudget has mobile apps and lunchmoney has reports (there are other small differences). Both of those are easy gap to fill.

That being said, the major differentiator is that InstaBudget is based on zero-based budgeting whereas lunchmoney has "soft" budgeting.

So in a way we're not competing for the same users.

Thank you.

Thank you for the feedback.

Interestingly enough I did have a free option before.

As you pointed out, the feature set in the free version felt so limiting and it added a lot of complexity in the application itself as well that I decided to get rid of it. There is also the school of thought about how paying customers are important to validate the idea compared to customers not paying.

I hesitated a while on the duration of the free trial period and you're right 14 days is probably too short to really evaluate a budgeting solution. A budget takes time tailoring anyway.

Pricing was mostly done based on competition, it's difficult to gauge the actual cost per user without any users other than myself. I'm forecasting the main cost to be on Plaid (though right now that'd be for US and CA only)

Out of curiosity, do you use a self-hosted or desktop personal finance solution? If so which one?

This is definitely something I loved about desktop YNAB.

I'm curious to know whether you are working with therapists on this effort?

FYI, until I read this comment I had no idea what the app would do, and even now I'm not too clear on what I would get out of the evaluation session.

Good luck, we need more mental health tools out there.

Hi, I've been working on the side for many months on a zero-based budgeting application. I am a team of one and learned many new technologies along the way to build this project:

* Django Backend

* React + Bootstrap in Typescript for the web frontend

* Flutter in Dart for the mobile applications.

* It is running on Digital Ocean with a Postgres database.

InstaBudget is a personal finance tool to budget and track expenses. It's using zero-based budgeting, aka envelope budgeting, methodology.

It supports: * auto-importing transactions from banks thanks to Plaid

* automatically categorizing transactions

* multi-currency

I was a YNAB user for a long time but never liked the latest version, so "naturally" decided I could build something myself.