Clear Budget app icon
Windows · macOS · Linux

Clear Budget

A private desktop budget planner built around a question, not a ledger: will the month survive? It models forward solvency, bill timing and credit card pressure before problems arrive.

Free and open source. Local-first. Multi-user. Your finances never leave your machine.

Most budgeting apps are retrospective ledgers that tell you where the money went. Clear Budget is forward-looking: it projects solvency for the months ahead and warns about mid-month overdrafts before they happen.

What Clear Budget does

Most budgeting software is retrospective. Clear Budget looks forward instead.

Forward solvency

Projects the next two months and answers the only operational question that matters: will the balance hold?

Mid-month overdraft alerts

Catches the dip when bills cluster before payday, even when the month still ends positive; it also names the first month you would go overdrawn.

Credit card pressure

Per-card utilisation, interest and a six-month balance projection, colour-coded by available headroom. Credit-limit changes can be scheduled ahead so every projection honours them.

Bill and income timing

Per-month skips, amount and due-day overrides, paid and received flags and one-off entries, plus end dates for bills and a delete that leaves earlier months untouched.

Private by design

Per-user isolated databases with a bcrypt sign-in and read-only viewer packages. No cloud, no account servers.

25 currencies

Choose your currency once and every figure follows it. Defaults to GBP.

Four views, one question

Each tab is a different angle on whether the month (and the months ahead) holds together.

Monthly Budget

Bills and income for the month, with the running balance or projected month-end figure and a mid-month overdraft warning.

Solvency

Overdraft status, a day-by-day forward projection for the next two months and per-card utilisation bars.

Credit Cards

One panel per card with live pro-rated balances and a six-month projection strip across every card.

Archive

Completed months summarised by year, with drill-down into any individual month.

Explore

Why this exists

The reasoning behind the solvency model and the architecture that keeps it honest.

Download

Native packages for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus the FAQ.

Clear Budget is a free, private, local-first desktop budget planner for Windows, macOS and Linux. It models forward solvency for the next two months, detects mid-month overdrafts when bills cluster before income, tracks credit card utilisation and interest with a six-month balance projection and supports multiple users with bcrypt sign-in and isolated per-user databases. Built with Python and PySide6, it runs entirely offline with no cloud dependency and is open source under the LGPL-3.0 licence.