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         $2145.00  Assets:Checking
        $-1000.00  Equity:OpeningBalances
          $192.00  Expenses
           $65.00    Food:Groceries
          $127.00    Unknown
        $-1337.00  Income:Salary
  ---------------
               0

Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems.

I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.

Thank you for all your observations. Two things: 1) floats were originally purposefully not allowed, for simplicity, but I might change that and 2) multiple groups with the same name are indeed not allowed, but you raise a good point: it should be possible to reference all groups with a common label if the only difference between them is an attached timestamp.

And yes, will definitely push Win/Linux releases soon!

> In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.

I've done that, it helped me a lot!

Most people don't budget at all.

Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and confusing to manage — not everyone is fluent in spreadsheet formulas, as basic as they may be, to the point of getting the setup right, and most template spreadsheets available pack a lot of unnecessary things and customizing them becomes a project of its own. There's also the feeling of despair realizing you're not even close to even having that much data or assets to put in. This is not only my opinion — this is what I've gathered asking friends and family on the topic.

So this is a way to keep things simple. Extremely simple. No integration to banks, no mental overhead, just a smart replacement for a piece of paper where you write down your income and your expenses. There is a lot of people that still use a physical notebook to keep track of their finances, in this day and age, out of sheer choice — it's a way to maintain focus on the big picture, and not miss any detail.

It's a way to express your finances in a portable, human-readable format that is essentially computable plain text. You can express your finances at a 10,000-feet level, know what your savings will look like, for motivation, and know where your money is going. This is it. Surely it will be too simple for many, but perhaps just about right for some.

You're also not vendor locked, your data is plain text and you can use the CLI (free and open source) to process it. I myself use the CLI and manage my sheets from Sublime Text. Yep :)

I've been using it for several years and wanted to get it into an app. I've been getting a lot of suggestions and requests from early adopters. I will definitely take yours into consideration. There's a lot of room for improvements.

Re: GUI limitation, there's a CLI which is open source and free:

https://github.com/galvez/plainbudget

The parser and processor have a comprehensive test suite.

npm i pbudget -g

I talk about the DSL design and its capabilities in detail here:

https://hire.jonasgalvez.com.br/2025/may/8/plainbudget/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43941862

Points: 96

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This is a living book, it'll be expanded and updated often.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725088

Points: 7

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