New budgeting app is a drop-in replacement for Simple, and I love it

On the day of Simple’s planned relocation to BBVA, a new and inspiring simple budget application appeared: DAS Budget. An ordinary user himself, the developer Anthony Alves reacted for the first time to the news of the bank termination like me: Trying almost every alternative bank he could. After a similar disappointment, he decided to change his mind, trying new budget tools instead of banks, but the overly complicated choices left him (and all of us) unhappy. What he really wanted was for the Simple user interface to end and connect Any bank. So that’s exactly what he made and I love it.

DAS Budget is, as the name implies, a budget application. Its back-end runs on Google Cloud and connects to Plaid, a popular service that integrates with thousands of banks (hopefully yours too) and collects your financial data – even the new Google Pay app uses Plaid for her bank account information. Historical transactions are displayed in the DAS budget immediately after logging in and new transactions are displayed according to your bank and Plaid schedule, anywhere every few hours to once a day.

It’s not as straightforward as it used to be perfect Recreate this aspect – you will probably want to keep your bank transaction alerts enabled if it offers them. From the moment the transactions enter the DAS budget, it looks and works extremely similar to Simple: the transactions are given a category, notes can be made and they can be labeled “expenses” by any of your goals or expenses.

For those who come from Simple, DAS Budget has almost the same meanings and terminology – or as close as possible. “Safe-to-Spend” was a simple brand, after all, so you should live with “Free-to-Spend”. In fact, the DAS Budget currently works and looks almost identical to Simple, just below the typography and colors of the interface, making switching very easy.

This was a necessary first step to take the application off the ground, but the developer has planned an updated design that will maintain the same functionality leaving the application to stand alone longer. To me, planned changes look like simple ones could they looked like today instead of being largely stagnant in design.

Interesting for those who want to take a look behind the curtain, DAS Budget uses Google’s Flutter toolkit, making it look and feel like a modern Android app, while also being configured for iOS. While some Flutter apps feel outdated and unfamiliar to me, the developer did a great job of ensuring that the DAS budget is efficient and smooth on Android — and according to subreddit of the application, is also well accepted on iOS.

The app can be across multiple platforms, but it also supports recent native Android features, such as dark system-wide theme, biometric authentication for connecting to your fingerprint or face, a design that works beautifully with navigation gestures, login on Google and animations that are synchronized with the keyboard (a feature just introduced for developers on Android 11). This attention to platform and best practices is a breath of fresh air in the sea of ​​mediocre and unpleasantly outdated banking and budget applications.

I follow the public design and development of DAS Budget and it is refreshing to see the level of collaboration that developer Anthony Alves has with the growing community of ex-users who are still trying to find a suitable replacement.

From Simple subreddit and the Discord community to a new, very active one DAS budget submission, you can find Alves working through the desires and needs of ordinary refugees – and I among them. He published his own development roadmap as it operates through changes and new features. In summary, this excites me more than any of the neobank alternatives that try to take advantage of Simple’s death. feels like DAS Budget is truly designed to address the same needs that Simple did, providing a replacement that will improve over time. And this is wonderful, since I have not yet found a bank with all the same features.

During the week I used the app (ironically over a simple account that supports BBVA with pre-shutdown), I was a big fan. As an ordinary user, it immediately feels familiar while also improving to the full potential. For example, the DAS budget has an option to generate a recurring cost directly from a particular transaction, a godsend for quick in-app cost adjustment. I’m even more excited to see the public roadmap and design improvements coming. In the past, I was not a fan of budget applications over bank accounts due to transaction data delays – and to be clear, DAS Budget suffers from the same fundamental issue – but this seems like the best possible implementation of this model considering take into account this limitation.

Automated classes seem to be as accurate as ever, the design is simple and the workflow is much more intuitive to me than alternatives like YNAB or Mint. These budget applications seem to use design almost like a spreadsheet or extended budget based on the categories you use to classify expenses, while Simple (and thus the DAS budget) relies on a more prudent envelope-style budget where you set aside money almost in separate bins and then pay for things from them. The DAS budget is also based on your “Free Spending” cash idea, instead of always trying to display your total net worth or the total cash available in all categories.

These are more differences in mentality than anything technical, but they mean that the DAS budget just clicks for former ordinary users like me much faster than the alternatives.

The DAS budget is currently free during the beta only for invitation via Google Play for Android and Test Flight for iOS. It is expected to be released to the public this summer as a paid subscription to cover server and bank embedding costs. Interested users can contact website to sign up for a beta invitation.