Budgeting that thinks with you.
AI-powered expense tracking, voice entry, and smart categorization — built for people who hate spreadsheets.
Glorified spreadsheets, abandoned in week two.
Most budgeting apps are spreadsheets with prettier UI. You spend twenty minutes entering receipts on a Sunday, forget for a week, and quit by week three. The product fails not because the math is wrong but because the daily ritual costs more than it returns.
We started from a different question: what if entering an expense felt like sending a text? The product around that one question is the rest of this page — natural language, voice, sinking funds, monthly overrides, and optional bank sync.
Type or speak. We figure out the rest.
Type "$12 lunch at Chipotle yesterday" and the parser extracts amount, merchant, category, and date — all before you hit Enter. Or hold the mic, speak the same sentence, and let on-device speech recognition do the typing for you. The whole pipeline is local: nothing about that lunch leaves your device until you confirm it.
Speed matters because friction is the only real enemy of a budgeting habit. Bringing entry under six seconds is the difference between an app that survives the third week and one that doesn't.
Set aside $200/mo. When the bill comes, spend from the jar.
Annual insurance. Semi-annual property tax. Christmas. The new set of tires. Costs that don't arrive every month but absolutely arrive every year are the single most common reason budgets fail in December.
Smart Jars are sinking funds with the contribution math built in. Tell the jar what you owe and when, and it computes the monthly fill. The jar quietly accumulates all year, and when the expense event arrives you spend from the jar, not from your operating budget. No December surprise. No month-of scramble.
Auto Insurance
$1,200 / $1,800
Property Tax
$3,200 / $4,800
Summer Vacation
$1,100 / $3,000
December isn't June.
Holiday spending isn't normal spending. Most budgeting apps pretend it is, then act surprised when the December grocery bill blows the limit. Smart Budgeting lets you set month-specific category limits — $600 for December dining, $300 for June — without rewriting your whole budget.
Past months freeze as snapshots, so a January look-back at December accurately reflects the December budget rather than today's. Historical reports stay honest as your category limits evolve.
Dining out
$240 / $300Groceries
$520 / $600Travel
$80 / $200Dining out
$510 / $600Groceries
$720 / $800Travel
$1100 / $1200Connect your personal AI to manage your budget.
Prefer to manage your finances through Claude, ChatGPT, or another assistant? Life Budget natively supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Connect your personal AI securely and let it handle the routine work for you.
Your AI can search and recategorize transactions, tag them, adjust category limits and your monthly goal, and edit recurring rules—all through natural conversation in the assistant you already use. It works on your records only; it can never move real money.
Auto-import. Smart categorize. You approve.
On Pro, connect via Plaid and let transactions arrive in a Pending Review queue with smart categorization based on your learned and saved behavior. Approve in bulk, override the exceptions, done. The system learns from your overrides — the next month's suggestions get noticeably more accurate.
Pro also unlocks 24 months of historical import (Plaid's maximum) and integration with the AI Advisor, which reads your real spending and proposes concrete budget adjustments grounded in your actual patterns rather than industry averages.
Built for the financial data it asks you to share.
Your financial life is private. We use bank-level encryption and a strict zero-surveillance policy to keep it that way.
AES-256-GCM envelope encryption at rest.
Two-tier key hierarchy — your data has its own key, itself encrypted under a master key kept apart from the database.
We never sell data. The business model is subscriptions, not surveillance.
Disconnect any bank in one click — Plaid access is revoked and its synced transactions are purged by default.
What's included on each tier
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Manual transaction entry | ||
| Voice input | ||
| Natural-language parsing | ||
| Categories + Smart Jars | ||
| CSV import | ||
| Connect your personal AI (MCP) | ||
| Plaid bank sync | ||
| Smart transaction classification | ||
| 2 years of transaction history | ||
| AI Advisor budget integration |
Everything you might be wondering
Type a sentence like "Starbucks $6 yesterday" and the parser extracts amount, merchant, category guess, and date. The parser runs locally — your text never leaves your device.
A sinking fund is a savings target you contribute to monthly, drained when the expense event arrives. Use it for annual insurance, semi-annual property tax, or any irregular but predictable cost — it eliminates budget shock.
No. Bank sync via Plaid is a Pro tier feature. Manual entry, voice input, NL parsing, categories, and Smart Jars are all free and unlimited.
Bank access tokens and transaction data are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM in a two-tier DEK key hierarchy. We never sell data. Disconnecting a bank revokes Plaid access and deletes the synced transactions.
Yes. CSV import is free for any bank that exports transaction history. Plaid sync (Pro) imports up to 24 months of history automatically.
On the free tier, we suggest categories from natural-language parsing rules. On Pro, the AI classifies imported transactions using your historical category patterns and approves in bulk.
Yes. Month-specific category limits let you set $600 for December dining and $300 for June dining without rewriting your full budget. Past months freeze as snapshots.
Yes — your real spending feeds the simulator's projections. Live spending data tightens the simulator's estimates and lets the AI Advisor (Pro) suggest concrete adjustments.