Budget Forward keeps track of your money privately with no accounts or subscriptions needed

Budget Forward Ipad Screenshot
Budget Forward Ipad Screenshot (Image credit: Monagle pty)

What you need to know

  • After two years of development Budget Forward helps you keep track of your spending without a subscription or in-app ads.

Keeping tabs on your savings, expenses, and anything to do with money is super important but it's also something that most people don't enjoy. It's no fun and it can be complicated to boot. After two years of development Budget Forward is a new app that hopes to do away with that complication while still offering the features you'll need to get a clear picture of where you are financially. And it won't make you create an account or pay a monthly subscription, either.

The simple theory behind Budget Forward is that you tell the app how much money you have now and then work forward from there. You won't be importing years of data – the past is gone, after all – but the app will help you plan for the future by showing you what's going where, and when.

Budget Forward is a budget planning app that takes your savings and debts along with your income and expenses and simulates your future financial position. You can also set goals such as repaying or offsetting loans, paying off credit cards and saving for future expenses. Budget Forward will know when you have available funds and allocate them to these goals according to priority

Unlike many budgeting apps, Budget Forward doesn't use any off-device processing or storage beyond iCloud for syncing purposes. That ensures complete privacy – again, something not afforded by some of the web-based services many of us are using today.

We are really big on user privacy! Since iOS devices contain such powerful hardware, there is no need for us to use a server for any processing. This has the advantages of keeping your data private on your own device and being lightning fast, while giving you access to it, with or without an internet connection. We use iCloud for syncing which is only accessible with your credentials and we have no visibility of any user data.

Available for iPhone and iPad now with a Mac version coming, Budget Forward can be picked up from the App Store now. It'll cost $11.99 for both iPhone and iPad versions and and then you're done. You can find more about what the app can do at the Budget Forward website as well.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.