I know what you're thinking. The world doesn't need another budgeting app. You're probably right. But hear me out.
I've used YNAB, Mint (RIP), Copilot, Monarch, and more spreadsheet templates than I want to admit. They all annoyed me in different ways.
YNAB is powerful but it wants you to adopt a whole philosophy. Give every dollar a job, reconcile your accounts regularly, learn what "age of money" means. I spent more time managing YNAB than actually thinking about my finances. I don't want a budgeting practice. I want to know if I can afford the thing I'm looking at.
The simple apps go too far the other direction. Enter income, subtract bills, see what's left. Great for about five minutes until you need to track something that doesn't fit their three categories.
I wanted something in between and couldn't find it. So I built Money Me.
How it started
Weekend project. Classic. I just wanted to answer a few questions without a lot of fuss: what's my actual financial position right now? What does next month look like? Where's money disappearing that I haven't noticed?
The first version was barely an app. Income in, expenses out, a forecast showing when I'd run out of money at my current pace. No bank connections, no AI-powered insights, no gamification badges. Just arithmetic.
The weird thing is, that rough version was more useful than most of what I'd used before. Not because it was smart, but because it got out of the way. Open it, see the number, close it. No guilt about 47 uncategorized transactions. No backlog of receipts.
Manual entry in 2026, seriously?
Yeah. I know it sounds backwards when every other app is racing to add bank sync and automatic categorization.
But I've been on the other side of that. Mint would categorize my mortgage payment as "Shopping" and I'd spend 20 minutes unfiling and re-filing transactions. Plaid connections would break every few weeks and suddenly you're missing two months of data. The automation is convenient when it works and infuriating when it doesn't.
With manual entry, you actually know what the numbers mean because you put them there. It takes maybe 5 minutes a week. The tradeoff is worth it, at least for me.
Where Money Me gets more interesting is the forecasting. It projects forward — what does your cash look like in 30, 60, 90 days? Not just a flat calculation but accounting for irregular bills, the car insurance that hits quarterly, debt payments that change as balances go down. It's the thing I always wanted from a spreadsheet but could never be bothered to maintain the formulas for.
When it stopped being a side project
There was a week where I noticed I was checking Money Me before buying things. Not in a "I should check my budget" guilt way, just... it was the fastest way to know if the purchase made sense. That's when I realised the thing was actually useful and maybe I should take it more seriously.
So I rebuilt it properly as a PWA. Offline support, installable on mobile, actually fast. Added the features I kept wishing existed: debt payoff strategies (avalanche vs snowball, and you can compare them side by side), savings goals with realistic timelines, and something that flags when a spending category spikes compared to your normal.
It's been live at money-me.com for a while now. Works fine as a web app, no app store needed. But I kept getting asked "is it on the Play Store?" so I packaged it as a TWA (Trusted Web Activity — basically a PWA wrapped natively for Android) and that's where things got... bureaucratic.
The Google Play situation
Google requires 12 people opted into a closed beta for 14 consecutive days before you can release to production. Totally reasonable as a policy. Stops junk apps flooding the store. But when you're one person with no existing audience, finding 12 Android users who'll install your thing and keep it for two weeks is harder than it sounds.
I wrote about this already on dev.to. Classic chicken-and-egg: you need users to get on the store, but the store is where users would find you.
Some things I've figured out along the way
Building the product is maybe 40% of the work. Distribution is the rest. SEO, app store requirements, actually telling people the thing exists. Nobody mentions this part when you're excitedly sketching wireframes on a Saturday morning.
The "how often will someone actually use this?" test has saved me from a lot of bad features. Investment tracking sounds great on a feature list. In practice, people check their brokerage directly. Not everything needs to live inside a budgeting app.
And the indie dev community has been surprisingly helpful. People swap beta tests, share what's working, give feedback that's actually useful. Building alone doesn't mean being alone, which is nice.
Where it's at now
Money Me is live on the web. The Android app is in closed beta waiting to clear Google's 14-day window. The core stuff works well — dashboard, forecasting, debt strategies, savings goals, spending tracking. It gets better with each update.
It's not for everyone. If you love YNAB's zero-based approach, stick with YNAB. If you want auto-imported bank transactions, Money Me isn't that (at least not yet). It's for people who want to understand their money without adopting a whole system around it.
You can try the web app free at money-me.com.
If you've got an Android phone and 30 seconds to spare, I'd really appreciate help getting past Google's 12-tester gate. Beta testers get 6 months of Premium free once we're live in production.
Happy to swap tests if you're building something too — drop your link in the comments.
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For the technical deep dive on how I actually got this onto Google Play as a TWA (and everything that went wrong): dev.to/markusbnet/how-i-shipped-my...