Features
Longhand Budget is split into a Free tier that runs entirely on your device and a Premium tier that adds multi-device syncing, custom profiles, advanced forecasting, a financial summary report, and custom categories. The free retirement projection charts where your current numbers lead. Premium forecasting is a separate what-if workspace: build a scenario from your own figures, save it to a searchable list, and reload any of them later.
Longhand is built for intentional budgeting without bank sync or AI integrations: you plan with the numbers you enter yourself. The core planner needs no account, and the app never connects to your bank or any financial institution. If you choose to create an account for syncing, that data is hosted in the EU (see below).
No ads, no trackers, no AI — ever. Longhand shows no advertising, embeds no third-party trackers, and has no AI features: nothing you enter is sent to a model, because there is no model. This holds for every visitor on both tiers.
Free tier
- Income and expense tracking with weekly, biweekly, monthly, and annual frequencies.
- A common monthly basis — every value is converted to a per-month figure so totals are comparable; the conversion uses an average of about 4.33 weeks a month, so the monthly figure is an estimate. How totals are calculated sets out the exact factors and a worked example.
- Savings goals to track progress toward a target.
- Balance tracking for investments, debts, and things you own outright. Where a mortgage belongs covers loans, which are a recurring payment and a debt at the same time, and where the property itself goes.
- Visual breakdowns of income versus expenses, and of what you own — savings, investments and anything owned outright — against what you owe.
- Retirement modeling using a safe-withdrawal projection.
- Currency display with locale-aware formatting, or a currency-less mode for raw numbers — set on the Settings page.
- Dark mode — a dark theme you can switch on from the Settings page.
- Local-first storage — your data lives in your browser and never leaves your device on the Free tier.
Premium tier
- Multi-device sync — your data is securely stored and synced across all your devices, so your plan follows you from phone to laptop. Synced data lives on servers in the European Union (see below).
- Custom profiles — keep separate sets of finances, such as personal versus household, and switch between them without mixing the numbers.
- Advanced forecasting — build detailed what-if scenarios from your income and expense growth, one-time events, and current savings, then save each forecast to a searchable list and reload any of them back into the builder. Saved forecasts are stored on servers in the European Union.
- Financial summary report — produce a clean summary of your budget, your current net worth, and your savings goals, then save it as a PDF or print it through your browser's own print dialog. The summary is assembled in your browser from the figures on your device, so nothing is sent anywhere to produce it. It is a document to read or keep, not a backup: it cannot be loaded back into the app.
- Custom categories — create your own income and expense categories, pick one when you add or edit an entry, and see the overview charts grouped the way you think about your money instead of one slice per entry. Renaming a category updates every entry that uses it, and deleting one leaves those entries in place, simply uncategorized. The categories page also breaks your money down by category, showing what each one totals and what share of that side it is, with everything unassigned gathered into a single Uncategorized line.
Privacy and data location
Longhand is built around data sovereignty. When you upgrade to Premium, your synced data is stored on servers located in the European Union. There is no US data residency, which keeps your information outside the scope of the US CLOUD Act.
See the FAQ for answers to common questions, or return to Getting started.