Why I Built a Budget App That Knows Nothing About You

Last year, I signed up for a popular budgeting app. During setup, it asked for my bank login credentials. Not an API token. Not read-only access. My actual username and password.

I’m an SRE. I’ve seen what happens when companies get breached. I’ve helped clean up the aftermath. So I closed the tab and started thinking about what a budget app should look like.

The Problem With Every Budget App

I tried a dozen of them. They all had the same pitch: “Connect your bank and we’ll track everything automatically!” Sounds great. Here’s what they don’t emphasize:

• They want your bank credentials. Most use third-party aggregators that store your login details on their servers. One breach and your financial life is exposed.
• Your data lives on their cloud. Every transaction, every balance, every spending habit—sitting on someone else’s infrastructure, governed by someone else’s security practices.
• They track everything. Usage analytics, behavioral data, spending patterns. Some sell anonymized data to advertisers. Some share it with “partners.”
• Subscriptions everywhere. $5/month here, $10/month there. To look at your own financial data. The irony of paying a recurring fee to a budgeting app is not lost on me.

I don’t think any of these apps are malicious. But I do think the incentive structure is broken. When your business model depends on holding user data, you’re incentivized to collect more of it, not less.

The Decision to Build Something Different

I wanted a budget tracker that followed one simple principle: your financial data should never leave your device unless you explicitly choose to move it.

Not “we encrypt it in transit.” Not “we anonymize it.” Not “trust us, we’re SOC 2 compliant.” The data literally does not exist anywhere except your own machine.

So I built Ledgr.

What Ledgr Actually Does

Ledgr is a desktop app for budget tracking and forecasting. It runs on Windows and Linux. Here’s what makes it different:

• 100% local storage. Your data is stored on your device in an encrypted SQLite database. There is no cloud. There is no server. There is nothing to breach.
• AES-256-GCM encryption. Your data is encrypted at rest with keys derived from your password using PBKDF2. Even if someone copies your database file, they can’t read it.
• No accounts, no telemetry, no tracking. Ledgr doesn’t know who you are. It doesn’t phone home. It doesn’t collect analytics. I genuinely have no idea how many people use it.
• Full-featured budgeting. Transaction tracking with smart categorization, budget forecasting, net worth tracking, OFX and CSV import, recurring transaction detection, and what-if scenario modeling.
• Free forever. No subscription, no premium tier, no “upgrade to unlock.” Every feature is available to everyone.

Why Open Source Matters for Financial Tools

Ledgr is open source under AGPL-3.0. This isn’t a marketing decision. It’s a trust decision.

When a closed-source app says “we don’t track you,” you’re taking their word for it. When an open-source app says it, you can verify. You can read every line of code. You can see exactly what the encryption does, what the app stores, and what it sends over the network (nothing).

For financial tools specifically, I think this matters more than almost any other category of software. This is the most sensitive data most people have. The code handling it should be auditable by anyone.

If you can’t inspect the code that handles your money, you’re trusting a promise. Open source replaces the promise with proof.

Security researchers can audit it. Developers can fork it. Anyone can verify that the privacy claims are real. That’s the level of transparency financial software should have.

Try It

Ledgr is available now for Windows and Linux. Download it, use it, break it, file issues, submit PRs. No sign-up required. No credit card. No email capture. Just download and go.

If you’ve been looking for a budget tool that respects your privacy—or if you’ve been avoiding budget tools entirely because you don’t trust them with your data—give Ledgr a look.