Budgeting with no account at all

What you get

The entire app. Not a demo, not a limited tier, not a countdown: transactions, budgets, recurring bills, the calendar, envelopes, net worth, debt payoff and investment tracking all work exactly as they do for a signed-in account. Nothing asks you to create one, and nothing stops working if you never do.

What you give up: the honest list

This is a genuine trade-off and it deserves to be read before you rely on it:

• No sync. The budget exists on this device, in this browser. A second device, or a second browser on the same device, sees nothing.
• No backup. If the browser's data for this site is cleared: by you, by a cleanup tool, by a privacy setting, or by reinstalling, the budget is gone and we cannot restore it. We never had a copy.
• Private/incognito windows discard it when the window closes.
• No household sharing, since sharing needs an account on both sides.
• Storage limits. Browser storage is a few megabytes; that is years of ordinary budgeting, but it is not unlimited.

How to make it safe enough

Export regularly. Settings → Data writes a JSON file (or an Excel workbook) you keep wherever you keep important files. That is your backup, and restoring it merges everything back in. If you would rather not think about it, signing in with Google or Microsoft moves the same budget into your own cloud, keeps it synced, and costs nothing; Bufin offers to carry your existing local budget across when you do.

Why offer this at all

Because 'sign in to continue' is often just data collection wearing a convenience costume, and a budgeting app genuinely does not need to know who you are. Bufin is free, so a sign-in buys you sync and durability rather than access. Some people would rather have neither than hand over an account, and that is a reasonable position to hold about their own money.