Every dollar gets a job.
Every screen is just yours.
BudgetDork is a zero-based envelope budgeting app — assign income to categories, spend from them, roll leftovers into next month — plus deeper reporting than a typical envelope app bothers with. No ads, no selling your data — it's stored in a real database behind a free account, locked down so only you can ever see it.
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Why BudgetDork exists
Not a startup, not a growth funnel — a tool built the way a dork builds tools: because the math should be right, and your budget is nobody else's business.
Envelopes, done properly
Zero-based budgeting over a simple "category + monthly limit" model — every dollar is assigned somewhere, spending draws that envelope down, and what's left rolls forward. It's more moving parts than a spreadsheet, but it's the actual reason a budgeting tool earns its keep.
Private by design
Every row in the database is locked to your own login — Row Level Security, enforced by Postgres itself, not just app-level trust — so no other account can ever see or touch your budget. Nothing is sold, shared, or folded into an "anonymized" dataset with your spending in it.
Real-world money is messy
Split purchases, transfers, a mortgage payment that's really principal + interest + escrow + fees, credit card cash back, investment accounts that only move when you say so — the data model was built to represent what actually happens to your money, not a simplified version of it.
Built deliberately, not by default
Every non-obvious decision — why a transfer is two linked rows, why "Ready to Assign" is computed the way it is, why closing an account never deletes history — is written down and kept in sync with the code, not left for you to reverse-engineer from behavior.
Every transaction, typed by hand — on purpose
There's no bank sync quietly importing your spending in the background. Entering a transaction costs a few real seconds of attention, and that's the point: the friction is a feature, not an oversight. When logging a purchase takes actual effort, the money "feels" spent — you notice the impact on your bottom line and your future, instead of watching it scroll past in an automated feed you've long since stopped reading.
Read the full philosophy — money as buckets, and why typing it matters →
Everything a real budget needs
Not a toy demo — accounts, splits, transfers, recurring bills, and debt payments all work the way your actual finances do.
Every account type
Cash, Credit Card, Line of Credit, Loan, Mortgage, Investment, and Asset Tracking (for a house or car that's only revalued, not transacted against) — each grouped and handled correctly for what it actually is.
Categories, organized your way
Create, rename, regroup, and drag-reorder categories anytime — even mid-transaction, without breaking your flow — so the structure matches how you actually think about money, not a fixed starter template. Hiding one archives it; nothing is ever force-deleted.
Recurring transactions
Bills and paychecks on a schedule turn into real, fully-editable transactions the moment they're due — never phantom or future-dated, so your register always shows what actually happened.
Real loan & mortgage payments
Log a payment as principal, extra principal, interest, escrow, and fees — not one lump "payment" transaction that hides where the money actually went.
Splits, transfers & tags
One receipt, several categories. Money moving between your own accounts. Cross-cutting labels like "vacation" that span categories entirely. All first-class, not workarounds.
Multiple budgets
Keep a disposable practice budget to learn the mechanics in, right alongside your real one — switch between fully independent budgets from the sidebar any time.
Bring your own data
Export and reimport as plain CSV, or transition from another budgeting app: hand-build a simple 4-file CSV set from its own export. A worked example with a full column-by-column spec — what's required, what can be left blank — is one click away in the app's own sidebar. Some manual setup on your end, but BudgetDork wires up every account, category, transfer, and split connection automatically.
Credit card utilization at a glance
Every card shows its own utilization right next to its balance, plus one combined figure across all your cards in the sidebar — no separate report to go dig for it. Color does the warning for you: green under 10%, gold from 10–30%, and a pulsing red past 30% that's hard to miss.
Enhanced visuals & reporting
Budgeting only tells you where money should go. BudgetDork's Insights and Reports screens show you where it actually went — as charts and as real, exportable tables.
- Net worth trend — assets vs. debts, month by month, with a running net-worth line laid over the composition
- Spending by category — a filterable breakdown by date range, account, category, and tag, with a per-category monthly drill-down
- Income vs. Expense table — a full spreadsheet-style grid, one row per category, one column per month, exportable to CSV
- Payee spending & debt cost — how much you actually spend at each payee, and what your debt is really costing you in interest, escrow, and fees
- Account balance history — every account's month-end balance over time, alongside the net-worth chart
- One-click "Generate Report" — a clean, printable financial summary for a given date range, ready to hand to a tax preparer or just keep for yourself
Start budgeting once you're in
No install, no build step — just a free account to get started.
Request access
Just your email — a name and a note are optional. New accounts are reviewed individually right now rather than created instantly; you'll get an email either way, and an invite link to set a password if approved. Once you're in, your budget is private: Row Level Security means no other login can ever see it.
Explore with sample data
Import the realistic multi-account, multi-year worked example via the simplified importer to see everything in action before you commit real numbers.
Bring in your own
Start fresh, import CSVs, or migrate an export from another budgeting app — your real budget, private to your account, whenever you're ready.
Your money. Your data. Nobody else's.
BudgetDork is a working, still-evolving personal project — not a polished commercial product, and it doesn't need to be to do right by your budget.
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