I Combined the Best Parts of Every Budgeting App I’ve Used, and Made It Free and Open Source (FlyBudget)

dtymo — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:34:28 +0000

I’ve always been a little too interested in tracking my money.

I like knowing where it went, what I’m spending too much on, and how much I’m actually saving. Because of that, I’ve tried a LOT (a lot..) of budgeting apps over the years.

I kept running into the same problem: I’d really like parts of an app, but there were always other things I wished worked differently.

Eventually I had the very predictable software engineer thought of, “I could probably just build this myself.”

So I did! That’s basically how FlyBudget started.

I built the budgeting app I wanted to use
There are already plenty of great budgeting apps out there. I wasn’t trying to reinvent budgeting. I just wanted to take the things I liked from different apps and open-source projects and put them into something that worked the way I wanted it to.

The more I use FlyBudget, the more things I want to improve. Limiting my ideas has honestly been harder than coming up with them. And that’s also why I know I want to keep working on it for a long time.

Why open source?
FlyBudget is also my first real dive into building an open-source project. I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of value from open-source software over the years, so it’s pretty cool to finally put something of my own out there.

I also think it makes sense for budgeting software. Financial data is personal, and I like giving people the option to run FlyBudget themselves and keep control of their data.

My goal is to keep it free, private, and open source.

Where I want it to go
I don’t want FlyBudget to just be something I build by myself.

I’d love for people to report bugs, suggest features, contribute code, improve the docs, or just use it and tell me what they don’t like.

I plan on supporting FlyBudget for years, partly because I actually use it myself and partly because I genuinely enjoy building it.

It’s still early, and I’m sure plenty will change, but I’d rather put it out there now than wait forever for it to feel “finished.”

If you want to check it out, it’s at https://flybudget.org. There is a quick demo so you can try it out for yourself within seconds! (I thought this was pretty cool)

It is also available on Github: https://github.com/dtymoszenko/FlyBudget

If you find the project interesting, please leave a star on Github to help us grow the community! And if you find something that sucks... please tell me!

DEV Community: dtymo

I Combined the Best Parts of Every Budgeting App I’ve Used, and Made It Free and Open Source (FlyBudget)