Ledgerly

Ledgerly is a mobile budgeting app built for people who trust manual tracking more than automatic bank sync. It runs entirely offline on your phone, iOS or Android, and never requires an account or internet connection to function. The core insight is simple: every day until payday, show me what I can safely spend by dividing what's left by the days that remain. The app stores every figure locally, sells nothing, and uploads data only if you explicitly enable backup.

How manual entry shapes the workflow

Ledgerly deliberately avoids connecting to your bank. There is no login to hand over, no third party holding copies of your statements, and no guessed categories you'll spend the evening correcting. Instead, you record each transaction as it happens: amount, category, and a note. The app moves the daily spend number the moment you add a purchase, not the next morning when your bank catches up. The tradeoff is honest: if you want transactions imported automatically, Ledgerly is not the app for you. If you'd rather stay aware of every dollar as you spend it, and you don't mind taking a few seconds to record each one, this is built for that exact workflow.

The app starts with one straightforward setup. You say what comes in each month, set aside the part you want to keep (emergency fund, savings target), and give the rest a job, splitting it into categories. Once that's done, you spend normally and record as you go. Repeating transactions, like salary deposits and rent payments, handle themselves after the first setup: they show up under Upcoming before they actually land, so you know what's coming without scramble. You can search everything you've ever added by its note, its category, or its amount, so finding a specific transaction takes seconds rather than scrolling through weeks of entries.

The four-tab layout

Everything lives in four screens. My Budget shows today's safe spend amount and the live weekly calendar of what you've spent. Plan lets you see how each category is doing against what you assigned it, with spending shown as a percentage and any category over budget marked by how much. Money aggregates your accounts (checking, savings, cash, credit cards) into one net worth figure that updates the moment you record a transaction. Tools holds settings, export options, and the optional backup switch. Nothing is buried three menus deep; the app keeps the interface flat and immediate.

The daily spend calculation works like this: take what's left in the current pay period, subtract what you still owe before the next payday (upcoming bills), divide by the number of days remaining. That single number sits at the top of My Budget. The page also shows the math underneath: left to spend, flexible money after obligations, expected bills coming. So you see what's feeding the daily number. If you spend fifty dollars on groceries, the daily amount drops right then, not whenever your bank processes the transaction. The design explicitly avoids alarm colors and guilt-inducing feedback; going over budget is just a line that says how much by.

Moving money between accounts is treated as a transfer, not as spending, so shifting fifty dollars from savings to checking doesn't blow your budget math. When the app and your actual account disagree (which happens when you've written a check that hasn't cleared, or when a transaction posts differently), you can fix it in one line by telling the app what the real balance should be.

Pricing and trial

You get 7 days free with every feature unlocked. The trial starts when you finish your first setup, not when you install, so the full week is yours to actually use it. After that, it's a paid app. The App Store and Google Play set the price for your country, so you'll see your local currency and the cost you'll actually pay. The site itself doesn't publish a dollar amount because price varies by geography and currency conversion.

The app offers three paid plans: monthly billing, yearly billing, and a lifetime purchase. There is no second tier and nothing held back for a higher plan; every tier gives you the same features. If you stop paying a monthly or yearly subscription, reading, searching, and exporting your data keep working forever. Paying only unlocks the ability to add new transactions. Everything you've already recorded stays readable, and the CSV export keeps functioning whether you maintain a subscription or not.

Privacy and where data lives

Your data never leaves your phone. The app runs on airplane mode, so it has no home server holding your budget figures. The only way data leaves your device is if you turn on backup yourself. When you do, you choose where it goes: Google Drive, iCloud, or a file you keep locally. That backup copies everything, which is why it stays off by default until you explicitly enable it.

Two things do reach the network: your app purchase (handled by RevenueCat through your App Store or Google Play account) and crash reports sent to Sentry so bugs can be fixed instead of guessed at. Neither of those sees your actual spending figures. RevenueCat knows you paid; it does not know what categories you created or how much you spent on groceries. Crash reports carry fault traces, not your numbers. You can verify all three of these claims in about a minute on a phone with no signal, since the app functions offline without any background sync.

Language and currency support

The app is available in 5 languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. It supports 165 currencies, though it doesn't convert between them. A budget only makes sense in the one currency you actually think in. Once you pick a currency, every figure in the app displays in it. This makes Ledgerly genuinely useful for expats, digital nomads, and anyone who earns or spends in multiple currencies but wants to budget in just one.

Who it suits

Ledgerly works best for people who live in more than one country, who value privacy enough to forgo bank sync, or who've discovered they stick with budgets longer when they manually record each transaction. It's straightforward for freelancers with irregular monthly income, since it doesn't force you into monthly cycles. You can budget by fortnight, by the gap between actual paychecks, or by whatever period matches how you're paid.

It's not built for people who need automatic transaction imports or don't have time to record purchases. It's also limited to iOS and Android phones. There's no web version, no desktop app, and no way to sync across multiple family members' devices. If you want a shared household budget or multi-person expense tracking, you'll need something else.

Ledgerly's approach is genuinely different from the mainstream budget app, which is exactly why it works for the people it's designed for. You don't get AI categorization or spending analytics that judge your habits. You get a number you can trust and the data privacy that comes from keeping everything local.