Why I built Moneti

I built moneti out of frustration with You Need a Budget.

While I loved the concept of the application, I also found a few major pain points that I didn’t want to deal with.

Price

I think the price of $15 a month is kind of steep when such an application is not that complicated to write.
And I imagine most people that are looking to fix their economy are also looking to not spend more on apps they’re not sure will prove useful.

Let’s say, 6 months down the line they decide to stop using the app: this is $90 they could have saved.

Unintuitive, over-complicated UI

I found the UI to be more complicated than it needs to be, specially considering that the concepts for budgetting are extremely simple.

1. Every category in YNAB has to be in a category group.

It is nice to be able to group things up, but you can’t have categories outside of groups.
I think this is really annoying and restricting.

2. Transactions are created outside of the budget view

To record a transaction in YNAB, you have to go to the accounts view, create the transaction from the correct account, and also select the correct category.

I didn’t like this, so I made that you create transaction right in the budget view, picking the correct account there, which is unlikely to change.

(Now that I think about it, it’d be nice if the selected account was remembered between transactions)

3. So many buttons and options

Maybe some people find them useful, but I find them unnecessary.

4. The browser app and the mobile app are different apps.

I remember having to mentally adjust every time I went from the mobile app to the desktop app.

5. Other smaller things I can think of right now:

Clicking on a group hoping to expand it takes you to edit that group’s name instead.
The tutorial is not skippable.
Not being able to share budgets between users (they have since added this feature)

Paywall

An even worse problem is that if you stop paying, you can’t just not update or create data anymore, you’re also blocked from just looking your data.
And this happens immediately, it doesn’t even give you a warning.

So if you run into an issue with your credit card, tough luck, this is what you’ll get:

YNAB paywall non challantly explaining you can't use the app until you pay

I think that feels cruel and dissonant with their up-beat and jolly theme.

Lack of updates between devices

They added support for multiple users, but I can’t tell for sure if you have realtime updates between the desktop and the mobile app.

For a long time they didn’t have this feature, I honestly don’t know why would it take for such a simple app to have such crucial feature in 2023.