Hello Budget

Changelog

Every release of Hello Budget, newest first, described by what it does rather than by what changed in the code.

2026.9.3 — September 2026

Money coming in

Until now the bot knew only what left, which answers half the question. Whether a month worked out is not visible from what you spent — it is visible from the difference.

So there is a new section, in the bot and in the app: income. A salary, a refund, something sold, a gift. You say how often it arrives — once, every month, or every year — and, if it repeats, until when. A fixed-term contract that ends in June stops counting in July on its own, rather than having to be deleted, which would take the months it did pay with it.

At the top of the dashboard, and at the top of the first screen in the app, there are now three figures: what came in, what went out, and the difference.

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.

All of it is on the free plan, the recurring kind included. A balance worked out without your salary would not be a smaller feature — it would be a wrong number.

Income comes in from a CSV as well, in the bot and in the app. It is a file of its own rather than a column added to the expenses one: the two have different columns, and a single import that guessed which it was holding would guess wrong the day you export one and edit it into the other. They refuse each other line by line instead of quietly taking the wrong file.

In the app, income has a tab of its own — the fourth — and the add button is back in the middle of the bar where it belongs.

What went out now means what went out

The big figure at the top of the app used to be the total of the list underneath it. A subscription is money that leaves without being one of those rows, and the budgets have always counted it while that number did not, so a month with subscriptions looked cheaper than it was. It now counts them, and where the two numbers differ the screen says why.

Three things that quietly did nothing

The instalments button did not make instalments, and a shared expense was not booked to the account: what one screen knew did not reach the next, and arrived empty. The same fault made editing an expense, a budget or a subscription create a second one instead of correcting the first.

In the app, the Admin entry in the three-dot menu only appeared after visiting the profile — which opens from that same menu. It is there from the start now, for whoever is an administrator.

The app button is gone from the bot’s main menu. Telegram already has one next to the text field, and a second way in that sometimes did not open was worse than none.

Also: the page counter on the subscriptions counted expenses; one line of the subscriptions guide showed character codes instead of accented letters, and in English told you, in Italian, that you have no subscriptions; and cancelling while naming a subscription took you to the budgets.

2026.9.2 — September 2026

The app speaks your language

The bot has answered in English since the beginning, and the Mini App only ever spoke Italian. The switch that changes the language sits inside that app, so choosing English changed the bot and left the screen you chose it on in Italian — which reads as broken rather than as unfinished.

The whole app is now in both: every screen, every button, the guide, what a screen reader says, and the messages that come back when something will not go through. Amounts and month names follow it too — 1.234,56 and settembre on one side, 1,234.56 and September on the other, down to the comma key on the calculator becoming a full stop. The language is the one on your profile, the same one the bot uses, so the two can no longer say different things to the same person. Changing it redraws what you are looking at; nothing to close and reopen.

Errors in the right language

Sixty messages used to be written inside the server, which does not know what you chose to read in: half arrived in Italian to English readers, half in English to Italian ones. The server now says what it would not do, and the app writes the sentence. Every one of them, both languages.

Smaller

Reports sent from the app arrived without the version you were using, which is half of any answer — and the panel said they carried it. An answer to a report always went out in Italian, whichever language the person who wrote it reads.

2026.9.1 — September 2026

From this release the version says when it went out: year, month, and which release of that month. A number counting up from something somebody chose once says nothing at all.

No longer in beta

The warning about possibly losing your data is gone. With a monthly backup, an export button and people paying for it, it had stopped being an honest thing to say — and a warning that is no longer true teaches everybody to read past the next one.

Inviting somebody, from the app as well

Opening a shared account and inviting somebody into it used to be the bot’s job only. Both are now in the Mini App too, along with taking somebody out, leaving, and closing an account. Accepting an invitation stays in the chat, because the message with the two buttons is the invitation.

Saying what is broken, and what is missing

The information section gains two screens. One is for reporting something that does not work: you write it, and it arrives with the build you were using, which is the part that usually goes missing. Your reports stay visible with their state — open, known, fixed.

The other is a board of ideas, ordered by votes. Propose what you would like, or vote for what others proposed. Proposing something that is already there votes for it instead of opening a duplicate, and tells you so. Both work the same way in the bot and in the Mini App, and both are free.

Splitting with somebody

Shared accounts: a set of people who split what they spend, with a percentage each. An expense booked to one becomes one share for each of you, in your own list and your own budgets, with the row saying who actually paid. An invitation is a message with two buttons and shares nothing until it is answered, and anybody in the account can delete a shared expense — for everybody, because the other rows are the same expense.

An account either has money leaving a joint pocket, where nobody owes anything, or one person paying and the others giving their part back. It is asked when the account is named.

The second kind keeps a balance: what each person put down against what was theirs to pay, and the payments that would clear it. Each of those lines is the button that records it. A repayment is a transfer and not an expense — giving somebody their share back is not spending, and counting it as one would take it off a budget twice.

Paying over months

An expense spread over several months. You write the whole price and it is put away as one instalment per month, each dated to the month it belongs to, so the budgets ahead see it coming. The rounding goes on the last one so the parts add back up, and a purchase made on the 31st lands on the last day of the shorter months rather than sliding into the next.

On the free plan it counts as one expense, not twelve.

A year of Pro

A second way to pay: twelve months in a single payment. It does not renew — Telegram accepts a subscription period of thirty days and nothing else — and every screen offering it says so. Buying a year while a month is still running adds the twelve months on top of what is left.

One expense, split its own way

An account carries a split because most expenses follow it. Some do not: the dinner that was on one of you, the thing halved even though the rent is not. The percentage each expense was divided by is kept with it, so correcting an old one divides it the way it was agreed then rather than the way the account stands now.

Import, and correcting what is written down

Expenses can be imported from a CSV, and an expense can be changed after the fact — amount, description, category or date. A change to a shared expense or to a purchase in instalments reaches everything it is part of: the amount is split again by the account’s percentages or over the months, and the screen says so before the change is made.

Fixed

The Mini App

A second way in, opened from the bot and running inside Telegram: 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. Picking a category says which budget the expense will land in and what remains there afterwards.

Tapping an expense opens a confirmation before deleting it, rather than deleting it.

Pro

Paid in Telegram Stars, monthly or yearly. It removes the limits on expenses, history and budgets, and adds subscriptions, charts, CSV export and a backup sent once a month. The monthly plan renews itself and is cancelled from Telegram; the yearly one is a single payment for twelve months and does not renew.

Charts and export

Spending by category, spending across the months, and every budget against its ceiling. Expenses, budgets and subscriptions can be exported as CSV — comma separated with a UTF-8 byte order mark, so a spreadsheet opens it with the accents and the emoji intact.

Settings

The language can be changed between Italian and English, and Delete all data empties your account for good, from inside the bot, after an explicit confirmation.

Fixes