BudgetSheet is your own bank transactions in your own spreadsheet so that you can budget your own way.

That’s the idea of BudgetSheet in a nutshell. It started from my own frustrations with current budgeting software. I have tried a bunch of other budgeting apps like YNAB (You Need a Budget), EveryDollar, Mint, My own bank’s online budget tools, and a few others over the years. It always ends up the same way: I get frustrated with something I can’t do in their UI or with their tool that either makes me do way more work than I want to do (like taking 3-4 clicks per transaction just to re-categorize it with no keyboard shortcuts), or just flat out prevents me from doing what I want because there is no way to do it (like split transactions, create graphs, etc.).

Apparently I am not the only one out there with this frustration, either. BudgetSheet has struck a nerve with people, and now has a small (and growing) loyal customer base that loves it. It’s not the most money I’ve ever made from a product, because it’s priced for consumers, but it is the highest number of individual paying customers I have ever had from any product I have ever launched. There is some real traction here.

Plaid reached out about it, too. They want me to re-work the Plaid integration part so that end users aren’t signing up for their own developer accounts, so I am hard at work on BudgetSheet 2.0 and expect to release it by the end of September. Plaid partnered with Microsoft to build an official bank integration into Excel for paying Office 365 members, and they see the potential in BudgetSheet too for Google Sheets users.

Things are going really well for BudgetSheet. Getting traction and paying users has been effortless. Users love the product. It hasn’t felt like an uphill slog at all. Instant product-market fit in the first version. This never happens to me.

It’s weird sometimes how life works. I have spent years of effort trying to build larger, more complex web applications and SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings with various degrees of failure and some limited modest successes. BudgetSheet just connects Plaid to Google Sheets, and it may very well be the best product I have ever made. Who knew?

Here’s to the future of BudgetSheet, and to the upcoming v2.0 release. 🍻