BudgetBud

A simple, free, no-nonsense and collaborative budgeting tool to manage expenses efficiently.

Features ✨

• Create & Manage Budgets – Set up budgets with different categories like rent, groceries, entertainment, and more.

• Track Expenses – Add and remove expenses to see remaining funds and spending patterns.

• Collaborate with Others – Share your budget with family members or roommates for seamless financial planning.

Screenshots

Developer Details

The core principles for this project are -

• Cost-Efficient Hosting – Design to run seamlessly on free-tier cloud providers, ensuring minimal operational costs.
• Focused & Minimalist – No unnecessary visualizations or feature bloat—built solely to support disciplined financial planning.
• Web first - Leverage PWA and build a great web client to avoid app market fees
• Privacy first - Don't store any data which isn't required for the core function.

Client/ WebUI

Client can be independently developed by standard vite - react dev flow - To start the client dev server just do -

npm run dev

If it's the first time. Make sure to run -

npm install

There are some controls available to modify/ tweak the dev flow in .env.development file -

.env.development: This is a file to store runtime configurations which will be available to the app. The development one will be used for the local development builds, while .env.production will be used when building the production version of the app.

VITE_CREATE_DUMMY_DATA=true # Populate the app with some dummy data to test out UI features
VITE_PING_REMOTE=false # Send a heartbeat/ ping to remote API to test connection
VITE_USE_LOCAL_DATA_SERVICE=true # Decide between using a local data service backed by browser's localData or the remote API
VITE_CLEAR_USER_DATA_ON_LOAD=true # Clear the local data/ reset it on load.

API server

If you want to test out E2E App. Build client before the server -

npm run build

This will populate the wwwroot folder with the client. Then use the following command to run the dev server -

dotnet run

You will need to configure the dev environment by creating a appsettings.Development.json based on the appsettings.json file. Populate the connection string to be able to test out the server.

appsettings file: Just like th .env files, these are configurations available to the webb server during runtime. Comes in development and production flavours.

Relevant settings -

  "CosmosDb": {
    "ConnectionString": "",
    "Database": "",
    "Container": ""
  },
  "EnableSwagger": false

If enabled, swagger will be available at http://<origin>/swagger URL. You can use the Swagger UI to test out APIs to ensure your changes work as expected.

Everything available in appsettings.json can be overriden by creating envirement variables witht the same name or with CosmosDb:ConnectionString like pattern for nested keys.

Deployment and infrastructure

This application is currently designed to be hosted on Microsoft Azure, leveraging:

• Cosmos DB (free tier) for scalable, cloud-native data storage.

• Azure App Service (most basic tier) and it's inbuilt authentication for social oauth.

Contributing

The project is currently at it's minimum requirement complete stage. All contributions are most welcome as long as the basic principles are followed. Only request is to file an issue first to have a discussion around the contribution :)