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

The Solvency view of a sample budget: a green banner reading safe, a health breakdown, then the next two months walked day by day with the second marked overdrawn in red and priced. — The verdict page, on an invented sample budget: this month is safe, the next survives and the one after goes overdrawn on day 28, priced at exactly what it needs. That is the product.

The Safe to Spend page: one amber headline figure with its promise and a shortfall line beneath it.

Safe to Spend Today

One number you can act on: the most you could spend today without knocking over any month ahead.

The month graph: a bar per day stepping down through the month, the final days below zero drawn in red.

See the month coming

Every day as a bar, judged against the overdraft you actually have. Red means a payment would bounce.

A credit card panel with a danger badge above a six-month projection strip shading from red to green.

Cards, priced forward

Utilisation, interest and a six-month projection per card, coloured by the headroom left.

The Recommendations view: an emergency buffer row, a verdict that nothing is needed, each month's low point, then measured retiming suggestions with the first ticked and its preview panel open.

What would fix it

Measured suggestions: retime what can move, then what each month still needs to find. Tick one to preview its effect; nothing is ever applied for you.

The Monthly Budget view: bills and income as two plain tables with a self-maintaining balance.

Private and offline

Your months live on your machine, behind a sign-in, with no cloud and no account servers.

Dig deeper

Everything it does

The full feature list: budgets, backups, bill timing, exports, keyboard, currencies.

Screenshots

Every page of the app, walked through on a sample budget.

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.

ClearBudget is a free, private, local-first desktop budget planner for Windows, macOS and Linux. It leads with a Safe to Spend Today figure: the most you could spend today while every month that still stands on its own keeps standing, named with the day that constrains it, followed by what you could spend from each later day of the month as income lands. It models forward solvency for the next two months, detects mid-month overdrafts when bills cluster before income, recommends measured changes when a month ahead cannot hold (retiming what can move, then pricing the extra income each month still needs, with try-it-on previews and an optional emergency buffer), 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, each holding any number of named budgets. A Graph view plots the month as the bank balance day by day or every card on one chart; a month exports as a self-contained web page and a range of months exports as a self-contained folder with an index. It has light and dark themes and a full keyboard path through every screen and dialog. Built with Python and PySide6, it runs offline with no cloud dependency (its only network request is a daily check of the project's GitHub releases for a newer version) and is open source under the LGPL-3.0 licence.