About Craft My Budget

Plan your month. Stick to it.

What it is

Craft My Budget is a free envelope-budgeting app for personal finance. The envelope method is a simple idea: at the start of each month you decide, up front, how much of your income goes to each spending category (rent, groceries, dining, savings, and so on). As the month goes, every expense reduces the matching envelope's balance — so at any moment you know exactly how much is left for each thing.

What you can do

Set a monthly income and salary date — the budget month adapts to your pay cycle.
Allocate to a default set of envelopes across three tiers (Needs, Savings & Growth, Wants) or customise them however you want.
Log expenses in plain English like "1200 groceries" or "uber 250" — the app's natural-language parser figures out the envelope.
See remaining balance per envelope and total left for the month, in real time, with a monthly dashboard.
Use it on the web or install it as a Progressive Web App on Android and iOS — same data, same account.
Dark mode (default) and light mode.

How Craft My Budget uses your Google account

Sign-in is handled by Google Sign-In. The app requests one Google API scope: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.appdata. This is the most restrictive Drive scope Google offers — it lets the app read and write inside a single private folder called the appDataFolder, which sits inside your own Google Drive.

What goes there: a single JSON file containing your budget — envelopes, allocations, transactions, and settings. That's it.

The appDataFolder is sandboxed by Google: it is visible only to Craft My Budget — not to other apps you've connected, not to anyone you share files with, and not to us. We have no server-side database holding your budget. Your financial data never touches our servers — it goes directly between your device and your own Drive.

You can revoke Craft My Budget's access (and delete the appDataFolder) at any time from myaccount.google.com/permissions. Full details — including the exact data fields, retention, and deletion procedure — are in the Privacy Policy.

Who it's for

Built originally for Indian salaried professionals who want the power of envelope budgeting without the complexity or cost of traditional finance tools, but it works anywhere with any currency.

Cost

Free. No subscription, no bank linking, no ads, no selling of data. The project is self-funded.