Budgetella

Budgetella (budgetella.app) is a privacy-first personal finance tracker — clean, distraction-free, built around manual budgeting with no ads and no noisy dashboards. Its origin is unusual and honest: Ozzy has used Budgetella himself almost every day for four years — for a long time its only active user. In 2026 he relaunched it as a native product (iOS-first: Swift 6 + SwiftUI + SwiftData; then Android), retiring the original React web app to a marketing landing page.

Most budgeting apps optimize for the opposite of what Budgetella wants: automatic bank connections (privacy cost, fragile, region-locked), busy dashboards, and engagement mechanics. Ozzy deliberately chose manual entry and local-first privacy — a bet that friction-by-design produces awareness, which is the actual point of budgeting.

The native rebuild made three deliberate architecture bets, each a design statement: local-first data (SwiftData) for privacy and speed; native StoreKit 2 for subscriptions with no RevenueCat / third-party billing SDK (consciously minimizing dependencies); and Sign in with Apple + Face ID lock so the private data stays private on-device.

The design language is "dark glass premium" (accent #6E5BFF, Inter, an 8-pt spacing system). A concrete UX-cost problem the local-only decision forced: with no account and no server, how do you carry four years of a user's data into the new native app? Solved with an onboarding backup-import flow rather than a cloud migration.

Solo build across two native platforms; a strict no-third-party-billing-SDK rule; App Store review (memory records several rejections resolved — IAP, ToU link, AI-consent — worth a candid line); and the privacy stance ruling out the easy analytics/bank-link shortcuts competitors take.

Budgetella is live on both the App Store and Google Play (Play listing).