Today's Budget

Today's Budget is a deliberately narrow product, and the narrowness is the point. Most budgeting tools start by asking you to connect a bank account and then hand back more to manage: categories, envelopes, reconciliation queues, monthly reports. This one asks two things — what comes in, what has to go out — divides the difference by the days in the month, and gives you one number. The vendor's worked example is refreshingly plain: $4,500 income, $1,500 committed, $3,000 spread over 30 days, $100 a day. Strengths. The rollover engine is what separates it from a static daily allowance. Spend $50 of your $100 and tomorrow shows $150; overspend and the extra comes out of the days ahead. That means a single bad Tuesday does not become a failed month, which is the specific failure mode that kills streak-based budgeting for people with ADHD — and the site leads with ADHD testimonials from App Store reviewers who say this is the first method that stuck. Large purchases get spread over a chosen window ($600 over 60 days = $10/day), so a holiday does not sink the week it lands. Savings Jars and an Emergency Fund gauge compared against your last three months of spending cover the goal-setting side without a separate app. The privacy architecture is unusual and verifiable. Nothing leaves the phone: no bank connection, no account, no developer servers, no analytics, no trackers, no ads — the app is paid for by Pro rather than by advertising, per the vendor. Spending analysis and its commentary are processed on-device through Apple Intelligence, and shared wallets sync through your own encrypted iCloud, even between partners. The App Store label reads 'Data Not Collected'. For anyone who has refused to hand bank credentials to a budgeting app, that combination is the strongest argument on the page. The Apple surfaces are used well rather than decoratively: a Home Screen widget (Piggy) showing your number from morning to midnight, Apple Watch complications and quick expense entry so you can log a purchase from your wrist, CSV export of everything you logged, dark mode and Family Sharing for one household subscription. The backstory is real — Chris built the original spreadsheet as a student, Juno joined in 2012, and Daily Budget Original has been downloaded more than five million times. Fourteen years on the same idea is a reasonable proxy for a team that will keep maintaining it. Weaknesses. Manual entry is the load-bearing limitation: the daily number is only as accurate as your logging, and the app cannot tell you that you forgot the coffee. The Apple Intelligence commentary is device-dependent — if your iPhone does not support it, that layer simply is not there for you. The platform footprint is the other hard edge: iPhone and Apple Watch only, no Android, no web, no Windows, which rules out mixed-device households and anyone who wants to budget from a laptop. And there are no third-party integrations, so the data path out is CSV export rather than an