An envelope budgeting app, one pot per category.
Income splits into named envelopes, rent, groceries, transport, whatever your own life actually spends on, and each one shows what is left before you spend it, not after. The category is yours to name and colour; the arithmetic is the app's job.
Why a pot per category, not one number.
A single "money left this month" figure hides the question that actually matters: left for what. Groceries and entertainment can both be under the total while one of them is already over for the month. An envelope answers the specific question, "can I still spend on this", rather than the vague one.
Categories belong to whoever is spending. Spendthrift ships eight common defaults, food and eating out, transport, health, groceries, shopping, rent and housing, entertainment, and bills and utilities, each renameable, recolourable and deletable, plus unlimited categories and subcategories of your own. A subcategory takes shades of its parent's own colour, so a family of categories reads as a family before a single word is read.
How an envelope behaves.
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Assign an amount
Give the envelope a rupee amount for the month, as part of a zero based plan or on its own.
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Spend against it
Every expense in that category reduces what is left in its envelope, and only that one.
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See what is left, honestly
Under budget shows what remains. Over budget shows a real negative, in words and in colour, never hidden or capped to look fine.
One month, five envelopes, one honest overspend.
The method in numbers
This is the same worked month that backs zero based budgeting: assign the income, spend against the envelopes, and let the one over budget show it plainly rather than pretending it is fine.
The gap most envelope apps leave open.
An envelope holds a category's own spending well. It does not, on its own, hold what happens when a bill is shared between people, a dinner split four ways, a flatmate's half of the electricity. That is a second app's job in most budgets: envelope budgeting and group splitting are two separate methods, built by separate products, that were never designed to talk to each other. Spendthrift keeps both in the same ledger: a shared bill's paid share lands in the payer's own envelope as real spending, and the rest is recorded as money owed back, automatically. See the split calculator for that half on its own, or the budgeting apps for couples roundup for how others handle it.
Questions.
What is envelope budgeting
Splitting income into named pots, one per category, rent, groceries, transport, and spending only against the pot that matches. It began as literal cash in paper envelopes; an app keeps the same idea without the cash.
How many envelopes should I have
As many as your spending actually has categories, no more. Spendthrift ships eight common defaults, renameable, recolourable and deletable, plus unlimited categories of your own with unlimited subcategories.
What happens when one envelope runs out
It goes negative, visibly, in the reserved warning colour, with the exact amount over stated in words. The other envelopes are untouched, so one bad week in one category does not quietly borrow from another without you deciding to.
Can two people share the same envelopes
That is the specific gap this app is built to close: a shared envelope that both partners see, where a shared bill's paid share lands as real spending and the rest is recorded as owed back, in one ledger.
What the envelope actually does, month to month.
Three things this page describes but cannot show
Moving money between envelopes when life does not follow the plan, an honest negative that is never quietly capped, and one envelope two people both watch.
Cover an overspend from somewhere else.
Eating out went ₹2,000 over. Move ₹2,000 from transport and both envelopes are correct again, with the month's total unchanged.
- Groceries left
- ₹4,400
- Transport left
- ₹2,400
- Eating out over
- ₹1,200
- Bills left
- ₹1,300
TOTAL
One envelope is over. It says the word, never zero.
Over is drawn as over.
An envelope that is over budget is drawn below the line, in the warning colour, and it says the word. It is never capped at zero to look tidy.
One set of envelopes, two phones.
Both people see the same envelopes and the same figures, with no shared bank account and nobody keeping the record for the other.
See zero based budgeting for the planning rule behind the envelopes, the full money flow chart, or about for what Spendthrift is in full.