Why Every Budgeting App Gets It Wrong (From Someone Who Tried Them All)

The Graveyard of Budgeting Apps

I have a folder on my phone called "Tried & Failed." It's full of budgeting apps.

Mint. RocketMoney. Copilot. YNAB. PocketGuard. Simplifi. Each one downloaded with optimism, configured with care, and abandoned within weeks.

After years of this cycle, I've identified the fundamental flaw they all share. It's not a bug. It's a design philosophy that's broken from the start.

The Fundamental Flaw: Backward-Looking Design

Every budgeting app is obsessed with the past. They want to show you:

• Where your money went last month
• What categories you overspent in
• How your spending compares to previous months
• Pretty pie charts of historical transactions

But here's the thing: knowing I spent $400 on dining last month doesn't help me today.

What I actually need to know is: Can I afford dinner out this Friday without overdrafting or missing rent? That's a forward-looking question. Category reports are autopsies. I need a forecast.

Yet app after app gives me elaborate historical analysis while leaving me guessing about the only question that matters: what can I spend right now?

The Categorization Trap

"Smart" auto-categorization is the biggest lie in personal finance apps.

The promise: connect your accounts and the app will automatically categorize every transaction, giving you insight into your spending habits.

The reality: endless edge cases that break the system.

• Venmo payments - Friend paying you back for concert tickets? That's "Income!" Paying a friend for their share of utilities? Random expense category!
• Cash back rewards - Is that statement credit income or a negative expense?
• Transfers between accounts - Moving money to savings shouldn't look like spending.
• Multi-purpose purchases - That Target run with groceries AND a birthday gift goes where?
• Credit card payments - The big one. More on this below.

Each miscategorization requires manual correction. Miss a few, and your data becomes meaningless. Fix them all, and you've spent more time managing the app than understanding your finances.

Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Feature Bloat: The Race to Add Everything

In their quest to be "comprehensive," budgeting apps have become bloated Swiss Army knives that do everything poorly instead of one thing well.

RocketMoney offers:

• Subscription cancellation (already have a list of my subscriptions)
• Investment tracking (already have a brokerage app)
• Bill negotiation (not why I downloaded a budget app)
• Automatic savings (my bank does this)
• Credit score monitoring (free from my credit card)
• Late payment alerts (always arrive too late)

I wanted a hammer. They sold me a toolbox I'll never open.

Every extra feature is UI clutter, notification spam, and cognitive load. It's anti-user design dressed up as "value."

The Credit Card Blindspot

This one drives me insane.

According to the Federal Reserve, Americans made over 50 billion credit card transactions in 2023. Most people put their daily purchases on cards for rewards, purchase protection, and convenience.

Yet budgeting apps handle this terribly. Here's what happens:

• You buy $50 of groceries on your credit card → logged as $50 expense
• End of month, you pay off your credit card → logged as another expense
• Your app shows you "spent" $100 when you actually spent $50

The most common financial behavior among Americans, completely mishandled by the apps claiming to help them budget.

The mental math required to understand your actual spending defeats the purpose of using an app in the first place.

What a Budgeting App Should Actually Do

After years of frustration, I realized what I actually needed:

• Answer one question: "How much can I spend without going into debt or missing bills?"
• Account for upcoming obligations: Rent due next week should reduce my available balance today.
• Handle credit cards intelligently: My credit card balance IS my spending. Don't double-count it.
• Require minimal maintenance: A weekly check-in, not daily transaction review.
• Show clear status: Green = good. Red = tighten up. No interpretation needed.

The best budget is invisible. It should require so little effort that you actually stick with it.

Building What I Wish Existed

The budgeting app industry optimizes for engagement: more features, more notifications, more reasons to open the app. But users don't need engagement. They need outcomes: financial clarity with minimal effort.

That's why I built OneView. One dashboard. One number. One question answered: what can I actually spend?

No categories. No subscription cancellation. No investment tracking. Just the insight I spent years wishing other apps would provide.

If you've tried every budgeting app and abandoned them all, you're not the problem. The apps are. Try a simpler approach.