New design, look and feel, for desktop and mobile!

More consistent, simpler, faster, and dark.

The brand new version of the most privacy-respecting, secure, and simpler expense and budget management app on the market.

After interviewing many customers about what they liked and didn't like about the previous version, I am proud to present you this redesigned app.

It's now faster, simpler, more consistent, even more secure, and provides an overall better experience than before. With the new release, I have also refreshed the look and feel and updated the backend and frontend technologies used.

Budget Zen now has a modern design that should be easier to navigate on screens of all sizes. This version (like the previous ones) has been designed from scratch with mobile-first approaches.

For example, when opening the app on a mobile device (smaller screen), you'll see first the options to add a new expense, and after scrolling, the budgets, and only after that the month's detailed expense entries, as I found that's the preference people had on the go, but not so much on desktop, where you can see all three sections at once, and preferred the expenses on the left, then budgets, and on the right, the options to register a new expense.

Another example was to keep the main theme dark, without an option (to simplify the development and maintenance process), because everyone preferred the previous dark theme.

New features you can expect (not) to see in the next releases

With each update, I am focused on making Budget Zen an even better experience. That's why I'm not looking to add new features and enhancements, unless a sizeable portion of customers request them, or they're trivial to add, without cluttering the existing experience.

I did add three small features while redesigning the app:

• Any month navigation - it's not uncommon for people to want to go to a specific month, or navigate with the arrows, but then want to come back to "today". Previously, you had to click the arrows back or refresh the app, but now you can simply click on the month's name and choose a month/year directly.
  
  
• Three new currencies - currencies are only really a visual enhancement, but when looking at money, it's important we can identify what's being shown, so I added 3 new currencies which had been requested during customer calls: GBP, CNY, and INR.
  
  
• Type before ready - before, you'd have to wait for the whole budget and expense data for the current month to load, before being able to start typing a new expense, which wasn't ideal when you're on the move or want to register something quickly. Now you can start typing even before the data has fully loaded.

Budget Zen is based on the latest secure technology

The previous version of Budget Zen was built with Next.js (Node.js + React). Next.js has almost two thousand dependencies (almost two hundred direct ones!) and thus a lot of surface area for vulnerabilities.

Deno is made by the same original author of Node.js and has made it incredibly faster and much more secure, while promoting better ways of thinking about web-based software complexity, for example by trying to use web standards as much as possible and avoid installing dependencies. This also has the side-effect of helping a lot with maintainability.

Because of that, I decided to rewrite Budget Zen from Next.js to Deno, serving "boring" JavaScript for the client-side, making the website size incredibly smaller, much faster for the browsers to reuse, and I no longer have to worry about maintaining packages or hard upgrades. I only have to choose when to upgrade Deno and its standard libraries in order to keep benefiting from any new security patches. You can see it all in GitHub.

What you should know before trying out Budget Zen

It isn't a bloated expense and budget management app, and it focuses on your privacy. You don't install it from any app store, it's a PWA (Progressive Web App) that you should be able to install on any device, or just keep using on your browser.

I hope you enjoy this update, and appreciate the improvements that you're now benefitting from!