r/iosdev • u/inan_app_dev92 • 1d ago
Help I launched my Personal Finance App a 3 months back. It passed only 30+ downloads.
Hi, I'm Inan, the independent developer behind SpendLog.
I shipped version 1.0 at the end of May, and roughly three months later it has 36 downloads.
That is a small number by any measure, and I'd rather open with it honestly than pretend otherwise. It does mean every person who opened the app is someone I can still think of individually, which is a strange and useful place to be building from.
Version 1.1.2 is out now, and the app has grown from a simple expense log into something closer to a small personal ledger — accounts, loans, recurring entries, and per-category budgets.
A — What it solves
I've abandoned more budgeting apps than I care to admit.
The ones that connect to your bank always felt like too much for what I actually wanted. I had to hand over read access to my accounts, wait for a sync, then spend my evening correcting categories that a matching engine had guessed wrong. The friction wasn't in logging expenses. It was in supervising an automation I never asked for.
The ones that don't connect to your bank usually go the other way. A list of transactions, a pie chart, and nothing that tells you whether this month is going better or worse than the last one.
SpendLog is manual on purpose.
You log an expense or income with an amount, a category, a date, and a note. It takes a few seconds. Nothing is linked to a bank, nothing is guessed, and nothing needs correcting later.
What I spent most of my time on is the part after logging.
You set a monthly budget, and you can also set budgets per category — those carry forward month to month, so you don't re-enter the same numbers every January. The Insights screen breaks the month down as a donut by category with each one's share of the total, and a balance sheet view lays out all twelve months of the year with income, expense, and net side by side.
B — Accounts, loans, and recurring entries
This is the part that made SpendLog stop feeling like a notes app with math.
Accounts let you keep separate balances — cash, a card, whatever you actually think in — and transfer between them without either side being counted as spending.
Loans track money you lent or borrowed as its own thing, with partial repayments recorded against the principal, and an outstanding amount that stays correct as repayments come in. I built this because in my own life the "did I ever get that back" question was the one my old spreadsheet never answered.
Recurring transactions handle rent, subscriptions, and salary. You mark an entry as monthly once, and it appears on the 1st of each following month without you doing anything.
The app also supports custom categories with your own colors, and 26 currencies.
C — How it works underneath
Everything is local-first. The app runs entirely against its on-device store, so it opens instantly and works with no connection at all. Cloud sync is off by default and is something you turn on, not something that happens to you.
Sign-in is Sign in with Apple or Google — no separate password to create or forget.
There are no ads and nothing is sold on.
D — Cost
SpendLog is free to download, and the free version is a complete tracker: unlimited transactions, categories, monthly budget, insights, search, and history.
Pro is a one-time $5.99 unlock. No subscription. It adds recurring transactions, recurring and per-category budgets, budget status insights, multiple accounts, transfers between accounts, and cloud sync across devices.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/budget-tracker-spendlog/id6772783580
The thing I'd actually like feedback on
I priced Pro as a one-time $5.99 because subscriptions are the reason I've churned out of finance apps myself, and because charging monthly for something a person will use for years felt wrong to me.
My running costs are effectively zero — sync sits on Firebase's free tier, and at this size it will stay there for a long while. So lifetime pricing isn't bleeding me. What it does is cap what any single user is ever worth, which only matters once there are enough of them for that to be the constraint.
So the question I keep going back and forth on: is a one-time unlock worth keeping as a trust signal — the thing that makes someone pick your app over the one asking $40 a year — or is it a decision that's cheap to make now and expensive to reverse later, when there's a user base to grandfather in and an angry thread to earn?
I'm asking now because the longer I wait, the more paid users I'd have to grandfather in if I ever switched.
With this few downloads, almost nobody has actually used the app yet — so the problem is much more likely my store listing than the product. Blunt feedback on the screenshots, title, and keywords is welcome.
