Hello Budget

Your expenses, in the chat you already have open.

Open in Telegram

@hello_budget_bot · free, no account to create

Hello Budget is a Telegram bot. There is nothing to install and no account to create: you open a chat, and the money you spent today is written down in the same place you were already typing.

Writing an expense down

An expense is an amount, a category and a date. The bot asks for them one screen at a time, with an on-screen calculator for the amount — because what you actually paid is often two prices added together, and doing that arithmetic in your head before typing is how a number ends up wrong.

Categories are yours to name. The bot can put twenty common ones in for you the first time, and you add, rename and delete them from there.

Paying over months

A sofa bought over a year is not a thousand euros in March. You write down the whole price — what is on the receipt, not the monthly share — and it is put away as one instalment per month, each dated to the month it belongs to, so the budgets of the months ahead see it coming.

• The price, not the shareAsking somebody to do the division before typing is how a number ends up wrong. The buttons show what each plan costs a month.
• The parts add upThe rounding goes on the last instalment, so twelve months of a price that does not divide evenly still come back to what you paid.
• One purchase, one line of quotaBuying something on credit does not cost you twelve months of the free plan. It is one thing bought.

Budgets that answer one question

A budget is a monthly ceiling attached to a set of categories. The dashboard answers the only question a budget is for: how much is left, right now, this month.

• Per monthEvery budget starts again on the first, so an expensive January says nothing about February.
• Any categoriesA budget covers the categories you put in it, and a category can sit in more than one.
• Subscriptions countedA monthly subscription is spent whether or not you thought about it, so it is taken off the budget the same way an expense is.

Subscriptions

Recurring costs are entered once and counted every month after that — monthly, yearly or daily, with a start and an optional end. A yearly one lands in the month it renews, not spread across twelve.

Money coming in

Knowing what you spent answers half the question. Whether a month worked out is the difference, and for that the bot has to know what arrived too: a salary, a refund, something sold, a gift.

• Once, or every monthYou say how often it arrives, and if it repeats, until when. A contract that ends in June stops counting in July on its own.
• What came in, what went outThree figures at the top of the month: in, out, and the difference between them.
• Free, all of itA balance worked out without your salary would not be a smaller feature. It would be a wrong number.

Income has no category and does not touch the budgets. A budget is a ceiling on what you spend, and a salary inside a ceiling would be the wrong ceiling.

Splitting with somebody

A shared account is a set of people who split what they spend, with a percentage each. Book an expense to it and it becomes one share for each of you: yours in your list and your budgets, theirs in theirs, with the row saying who actually paid.

• Nobody is added without saying yesAn invitation is a message with two buttons. Finding somebody else's expenses in your own list because they typed your username is not a feature.
• Two kinds of accountOne where the money leaves a joint pocket and nobody owes anything, and one where a person pays and the others give their part back.
• Deleting is honestAnybody in the account can delete a shared expense, and it goes for everybody: the other rows are the same expense, seen from the other side.

On an account where one person pays and the others give their part back, it keeps the balance: what each of you put down against what was yours to pay, and the payments that would clear it — the fewest of them, not one per expense. Each of those lines is the button that records it. A repayment is a transfer and not an expense, because giving somebody their share back is not spending, and counting it as one would take it off a budget twice.

One expense can be split its own way — evenly, or all on one of you — instead of the way the account says, and the percentage it was divided by is kept with it, so correcting it later divides it the way it was agreed then. That choice is part of Pro; the free plan always uses the account’s own split.

Somebody else’s expense never counts against your own limits.

The Mini App

Some days a keyboard beats a conversation. The Mini App opens inside Telegram and shows the same data as the bot: the month’s expenses, the budgets with what is left of each, charts by category and across the last twelve months, and an add screen built around the calculator, with the categories and the dates as buttons rather than menus. Picking a category tells you which budget the expense is about to land in and what remains there once it has.

It is opened from the bot. There is no login: Telegram itself vouches for who you are, and the app is useless without that — opening it in a browser gets you a page that says so.

What is free, and what Pro is

Everything that makes the bot worth having is free: writing down expenses, categories, budgets, the dashboard, and the Mini App.

• FreeThirty expenses a month, the last three months of history, one budget, and one shared account of two people. Paying over months is free too, and so is everything about money coming in.
• ProNo limit on expenses, the whole history, any number of budgets, shared accounts and people in them, plus subscriptions, charts, CSV export, and a backup of everything sent to you once a month.

Pro comes two ways, both paid in Telegram Stars: 150 Stars a month, which renews itself and is cancelled from Telegram’s own settings, or 1500 Stars for twelve months, which is a single payment and does not renew — when it runs out you are back on the free plan, having been asked for nothing in the meantime.

Nothing is charged to a card and no payment details ever reach this bot: Stars is the only way Telegram allows digital goods to be paid for, and the bot is told that a payment happened, never how it was made.

When something is broken, or missing

Two things sit in the information section, in the bot and in the app alike.

The first is for saying something does not work. You write what you were doing and what happened, and it leaves with the exact build you were using attached to it — which is half of any answer, since by the time a report is read the app may already be three versions further on. What you sent stays where you can see it, with what became of it, because a report that vanishes feels like a report nobody read.

The second is a board. Propose something that is missing, or vote for what somebody else proposed; the most wanted are the ones that get built. Proposing something already on the board adds your vote to it rather than opening a second copy — a board carrying the same idea five times is a board where nothing wins.

Both are free. A limit on telling somebody their app is broken would be a strange thing to sell.

Getting your data in, and out

Expenses, budgets, subscriptions and income leave as CSV, and expenses come back the same way. The import takes what this site’s bot exports and what that becomes after a spreadsheet has been near it — semicolons, decimal commas, dates in the local order — because refusing those would mean refusing the only file anybody actually has. Lines it cannot read are listed with their line number rather than dropped in silence.

Your data

The expenses live on one server, in Germany, and are used for nothing except answering your own questions about them. There are no analytics, no advertising and no third party with a copy. The privacy policy says exactly what is stored and what is not, and Settings → Delete all data empties it for good, from inside the bot, without asking anybody.