Socle

Socle is a personal budgeting app built around the work a budget actually demands every month — and how much of it a program can take off your hands.

Expenses get in by import, not by typing. You download the statement your bank already provides (CSV or OFX) and drop it in. More than two hundred merchants are recognised and filed into your own categories without being asked; you sort the few unknown ones, and that choice is remembered for next time.

Annual bills — insurance, property tax, the car service — are entered once with their yearly amount. Socle divides them by twelve and folds them into the monthly budget, so the month they land looks like any other.

The budget itself is set once: income, planned amounts per category, annual charges spread out. It rolls over automatically every month. Planned and actual sit side by side, category by category, so an overspend shows up around the 12th, while there is still time to act, rather than on the 31st when there is not.

It also works out your emergency fund from the charges you cannot stop paying, and tracks savings envelopes with the month each one will be full.

Everything stays on your device, encrypted with a key derived from your password. There is no account to create, no bank credentials to hand over, and no server holding a copy — the app runs offline once installed from the browser onto a phone or a computer.

The trade-off is stated before purchase, not in the small print: lose both your password and your recovery code and nobody can retrieve your data, the publisher included.

19 € once. No subscription, no renewal, and a thirty-day refund with no questions asked.