Why I built Bento
I didn't set out to build a budgeting app. I ended up building one because I was juggling three different apps just to answer one simple question: how much money can I actually spend right now?
Subscription trackers
Genuinely good at one job: telling me what bills and subscriptions were coming out of my account. The second I wanted to know what was safe to spend after that, I was back to guessing.
Regular budgeting apps
Most either skipped recurring bills entirely, or had no idea my payday isn't the 1st of the month. I get paid on my own schedule, and every app expected me to do that math myself.
The "does everything" apps
The paid ones that tried to do it all buried it under so many screens and settings that using them felt like doing my own accounting.
So I built the app I actually wanted: one that tracks bills and one-off spending in the same place, understands that paydays don't follow a calendar, and just tells me what's safe to spend, without turning me into an accountant to get there.
Bento is published under Halcyon, but it's a one-person, spare-time project: built by me, because I got tired of waiting for someone else to build it.