Ballast Budget & Spending Tracker App

Overview

Ballast is a budget and spending tracker for people who budget by hand. The person answers four questions (take-home pay, bills, which categories to budget, a savings goal) and gets the month planned: pay minus bills minus the goal is the spending room, shared into category budgets. From then on Home says what is left and what that is a day.

It is manual by design: no bank login, no card numbers. Purchases come from a keypad or a receipt photo; the AI reads the receipt and the person checks it before saving. It records and adds up the person's own numbers and gives no financial advice.

Key features

• Home: money left this month, a daily figure, the pace line and the purchases the AI filed for checking

  

• Add: a keypad, categories suggested from the merchant, account, date and note

  

• Receipts: a photo read by AI into merchant, total, lines and category, with confidence in words

  

• Budgets: every category on one screen, each with its week-by-week spending

  

• Plan: bills on a 14-day strip and illustrated savings goals with a target date

  

• Reports: money in against money out for six months, a category donut and net worth

  

Screens

Welcome and four first-run questions, the planned month, Home, Activity with filters, a purchase (category, split, leave out of budget), Add, Scan and its check, Budgets, a category's budget, Edit budgets, Plan, Bills, a bill, a new bill, a goal, a new goal, Reports, Month review, Accounts, an account, Ask, Settings with Categories, Reminders and Delete my data, the paywall, About, Terms and Privacy: 34 screens, light and dark.

AI and backend

Supabase holds accounts, categories, transactions, budgets, bills, goals and their history, each row readable only by its owner; account balances follow transactions in a database trigger. One Edge Function runs four AI tasks with Gemini (read a receipt, file purchases, answer a question, review a month) against a daily allowance, and keeps receipt photos in a private bucket.

Monetisation

Ballast Pro through RevenueCat (monthly and yearly): every receipt and question, every goal, every month of reports, the month review and CSV export. Free keeps three receipt scans a day, two goals and three months of reports.

Setup

It opens on a sample month with no setup. Connect Supabase for accounts in the cloud and the AI, add your Gemini key, then RevenueCat for Pro. Bill reminders are local notifications.