Bufin is free. Here's how that works.
Bufin costs nothing to use: every feature, for everyone, with no plans, no trial period, no card and nothing reserved for a paid tier. It is funded by voluntary donations and by clearly-marked referral links.
There is no paid version
This is worth stating flatly, because most 'free' budgeting apps mean something else by it. There is no premium tier, no feature that greys out after a month, no export fee, no account limit and no upsell inside the app. What you can do on day one is what you can do forever.
What a donation does
It helps pay for servers, the domain and developer accounts. That's all it does. It grants no extra features, no badge, no priority support and no additional vote on what gets built: the moment a donation bought something, the sentence at the top of this page would stop being true.
Refunds on donations
Assume a donation cannot be refunded. Donations are gifts rather than purchases: nothing is sold, nothing is delivered and no access depends on them. They're also processed by an external donation platform, so whether a refund is even possible is that platform's decision under its own terms and the card network's rules: not something Bufin can promise or perform. Only give what you're comfortable giving away.
Referral links
The tools section inside the app lists accounts and platforms that have been checked, and some of those links pay Bufin a referral. That's disclosed above the list, every outbound link is marked as sponsored for search engines, and no recommendation is placed there because it pays.
What happens if donations don't cover it
The honest answer: the running costs are small because the architecture is small, your budget lives in your storage, not in a database we have to pay to grow. If funding ever fell short, the answer would be to reduce what Bufin costs to run, not to put features behind a price. And if Bufin stopped entirely, your files would still be in your own Drive.
Content last reviewed 2026-08-18