Work in progress

Budgets, expenses and accounts in one place.

Lemonbudget tracks what you spend, runs budgets that carry unused money into next month, and keeps your accounts, goals and recurring payments in the same place. There's a fair amount in it. It's all free at the moment.

Create an account What it does

Free right now. No card, no trial clock.

The Lemonbudget dashboard, showing budget categories, account balances and recent transactions

What it does

  • Every account you have

    Current accounts, savings, credit cards, cash, or a type you invent yourself. Add an expense, income or transfer in a few seconds with a category, tags and a note, and reconcile against a statement when the numbers drift apart.

  • Budgets that carry over

    Whatever you don't spend moves into next month, per category. You can adjust any month's carry-over by hand when something unusual happened, and budget months can start on payday instead of the 1st.

  • Where it's actually going

    Spending by category and by month, budget against reality side by side, net worth over time, and a forecast of where an account balance is heading if nothing changes.

  • Recurring payments

    Rent, insurance, the streaming services you forgot about. Set them up once and they post on schedule, with a separate view of what your subscriptions add up to.

  • Goals and calculators

    Savings and debt-payoff goals, plus a handful of planning tools: compound interest, emergency fund, FIRE number, and how long a big purchase would set you back.

  • Photograph a receipt

    Point your camera at a receipt or a bank statement and the text recognition fills in the merchant, date and amount. It runs inside your browser, so the picture never gets uploaded anywhere.

  • 162 currencies

    Enter a transaction in whatever you actually paid in. Rates are fetched for you and everything converts into your workspace currency.

  • Shared workspaces

    Invite a partner or the rest of the household. Same accounts, same budget, so nobody has to ask what the other one already paid.

  • Import and export

    Bring your history in from any CSV (you map the columns yourself), or straight from a YNAB or Monarch Money export. Take the whole lot back out as CSV or JSON. You're not locked in.

  • Encryption, with a caveat

    Names, descriptions and notes are encrypted with a key derived from your password, and we store neither the password nor the key. Amounts stay readable to the server, because budgets have to add them up. That's not zero-knowledge encryption.

  • Installs like an app

    It's a website. Put it on your home screen and it opens in its own window and keeps working when the signal drops, then syncs once you're back.

Budget view with categories, amounts spent and rollover Adding a transaction Accounts and balances

Still building it

Lemonbudget works. It's also not finished. Everything in it is free at the moment, with no trial and nothing to pay, and if that ever changes you'll get plenty of warning first.

  • You enter transactions yourself. There's no bank sync, and if it ever arrives it'll be optional.
  • No App Store or Play Store version. The web app installs to your home screen and works offline.
  • Small project, built in Switzerland. Expect the odd rough edge.

Questions

What does it cost?
Nothing right now. No trial, no card, and nothing kept back for a paid tier. If we ever do start charging, anyone already using it will know long before it happens.
Does it connect to my bank?
Not at the moment, so transactions get entered by hand. A side effect is that we never ask for banking credentials and never store any. Optional sync might show up later, but it won't be compulsory.
What happens to my data?
Names, descriptions and notes are encrypted with a key derived from your password. We don't store the password, and we don't store the key either. Amounts stay readable to the server so budgets can be calculated, which means this isn't zero-knowledge encryption. We don't sell anything to anyone, and you can pull all of it back out as CSV or JSON.
Is it finished?
No. Things move around and some corners are rough. If something irritates you, say so. There aren't many of you yet, so it actually changes what gets built next.