Daily budgeting, entered by hand
Your budget is one number, and it is for today.
Jay works out what today can hold — after the bills landing today, the money you set aside, and anything you went over earlier — and shows you the figure. Standing at the till there is nothing to divide, nothing to remember, and no month-end waiting for you.
A month is too long to feel. A day is a decision you can actually make.
Free · no bank connection · installs to your phone
Tuesday
Left to spend today
$54.80
After the bills due today, what you set aside, and anything you went over earlier.
Log something:
What Jay does not have
Most of the design work went into what is missing.
Every one of these is sold as a feature somewhere else. Each is absent here for a reason, and several were built first and then taken back out.
Streaks
A streak moves the reason to keep going outside of you. It works right up until you miss a day, and then it takes the habit with it.
Points and badges
Rewarding someone for something they already had a reason to do reliably makes the original reason weaker. Jay has nothing to collect.
Progress bars
“$450 of $1,200” is a fact you can act on. A bar filling up is a performance of progress, and it asks to be felt about rather than used.
Net worth
This one was built and then deleted. A number that grows makes the next purchase feel affordable against money that is mostly already committed — exactly backwards for an app you open at a till.
A savings total
Unspent budget stays in your bank account, where it already was. Jay does not count it, total it, or let it quietly raise next week's ceiling.
A bank connection
Nothing to link and nothing to leak — but mostly, an app that records your spending for you is an app you do not open until the money is gone.
What it does instead
Three mechanisms, and no fourth.
You type it in
Every purchase costs you a few seconds and one look at what today has left. That look is the mechanism — not the record-keeping. Automatic tracking tells you what happened; typing it tells you what is happening, while you can still do something about it.
Money for people, and a pool for everyone else
Your own budget, a budget for each person you spend money on, and one “Other people” pool for the rest. Rounds, gifts and favours are easy to lose inside a category total and very hard to lose when they have a line of their own.
Pots for the things you actually want
Set money aside for a specific thing, a little each period. It is charged to your budget the day you set it aside, so the day you buy the thing it costs nothing. And an impulse comes out of the laptop money rather than out of everything.
Where the opinions come from
The reasoning is in the source code, with the papers attached.
Jay takes positions on how people handle money. Those positions are anchored to published work rather than to taste, and the citations live in the files that implement them.
Four suggested budgets, not twelve. More options produce less choosing, not better choosing.
Iyengar & Lepper · JPSP · 2000
The tightest suggestion carries a caution rather than praise. Being financially stretched measurably consumes the attention you need for every decision that comes after it, so a budget that feels like scarcity is not a more disciplined budget — it is a less likely one.
Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao · Science · 2013
The gentlest option exists because persistence beats ambition. A rate you keep outperforms a higher one you abandon in week five.
Thaler & Benartzi · Journal of Political Economy · 2004
The middle suggestion is the savings share of the 50/30/20 rule — the ordinary starting point, and a defensible one.
Warren & Tyagi · All Your Worth · 2005
Nothing is ever applied on your behalf, and every suggestion shows its own arithmetic so you can disagree with it. Warnings state a fact — “you have used more than you set aside” — and never issue an instruction.
Self-determination theory · Deci & Ryan
Also from Arachnida Apps
Hexis
Citing the work instead of inventing the rule is a house habit rather than a flourish particular to Jay. Hexis applies it to personality: the HEXACO model, the actual instrument, all six factors and twenty-four facets — and none of the horoscope.
Look at HexisReasonable questions
- Does Jay connect to my bank?
- No, and it is not on the roadmap. Entering purchases by hand is the part that does the work: it puts what is left in front of you at the moment you are deciding, rather than in a report afterwards.
- Why budget by the day?
- Because a day is a length of time you can actually feel. A monthly figure asks you to divide, to remember, and to wait a long way for the payoff; a daily figure asks you to read one number. You can still budget by the week or the month — the day is simply where it is easiest to follow.
- What happens when I go over?
- It follows you. Going over today leaves tomorrow smaller by that amount, and the overspend cascades through the budgets it sat under. Nothing is written off quietly, and nothing is hidden from the headline figure.
- Can I change something from last month?
- Yes, anything, at any time. Jay stores no derived totals — every figure is recomputed from your transactions and budgets — so editing a purchase from March corrects March and everything that followed from it.
- Is my budget shared with anyone?
- No. Budgeting for other people means naming who you spend money on; it does not give them an account or a view. Jay has no social features at all.
Find out what today can hold.
Jay is named for the scrub jay, which caches thousands of seeds and remembers what it hid, where, and when.