Envelope budgeting
Budgeting that tells you the truth.
Envelopes for every dollar. No bank login, no card, no autopilot promises. You set the limits, you enter what you spend, and Steadi does the arithmetic where you can see it.
Steadi holds no money, issues no card and connects to no bank. What is built, and what is not.
The sample sheet
A working demonstration of the arithmetic.
Not a screenshot and not a mock-up — the sums below run in your browser. It is a demonstration, not the product: the real app has free-form entry, categories, merchants, encrypted notes, planned purchases and monthly reports. What it does show is exactly how an envelope behaves when you spend from it.
Groceries
$420.00
left of $420.00
Transit
$120.00
left of $120.00
Eating out
$90.00
left of $90.00
Across all three: $630.00 left of $630.00
Nothing entered yet. Add a purchase and each line appears here with the remainder recalculated — the sample figures are ours, and nothing on this sheet is saved.
Sample figures. They live in this tab only, and Steadi saves none of them.
Three questions, answered before you ask.
Does Steadi hold your money?
No.
Does Steadi issue a card?
No.
Does Steadi need your bank password?
No.
How it works
Three envelopes, then a habit.
01
Name your envelopes.
Rent, groceries, tools — whatever your month actually has in it. Each one gets a single monthly limit. Three is enough to start.
02
Write down what you spend.
Every purchase is entered by you: where it went, how much, which envelope. It is slower than a bank feed, and that is the point — you see the money leave.
03
Read what is left.
Each envelope carries its own remainder and the sheet carries the total. Steadi does the arithmetic and stops there; the decisions stay yours.
What is built
Both lists, kept honest.
Most products publish only the first of these. This page publishes both, and where something depends on a setting rather than existing outright it is written out underneath instead of quietly left off.
In the app today
- Envelopes with a monthly limit
- Purchases entered by hand
- A history you can filter by category, merchant and date
- Planned purchases with a weekly savings target you update yourself
- A list of recurring charges you enter yourself
- Insights worked out by arithmetic from your own figures
- Monthly spending reports
- Notes on a purchase, encrypted before they are stored
Not built yet
- Statement import (CSV or OFX)
- Automatic detection of recurring charges
- Price watching on a planned purchase
- Any bank connection, of any kind
- Data export and account deletion
- French
- A published price, or anything to buy
One capability needs a condition, not a column.
Signed in, Steadi has a button that sends a summary of your own figures to a language model and shows you the paragraph it writes back. It runs only where a model key is configured; without one the request answers with an error rather than inventing something. Everything else the app calls an insight is plain arithmetic on your own numbers, and it is what you get without pressing that button.
Money & data
What happens to what you write down.
- There is no bank connection.
- Steadi never asks for a bank login because there is nothing in the app that could use one. Spending arrives by typing.
- Notes are encrypted before they are stored.
- A note you attach to a purchase is encrypted with AES-256-GCM on the way into the database and decrypted only when it is read back to you.
- The screens you use read your own rows.
- Every query behind the pages in your account is filtered to your user id before it returns anything. That is a description of those screens, checked against the code — not a blanket guarantee about every part of the system, which is not something a marketing page can honestly give you.
- No advertising.
- Steadi loads no ad network and sells nothing. Product analytics run only if you accept them, and this app sends none of your purchases to them.
- Export and deletion are not built yet.
- That is stated here rather than implied elsewhere. When they exist, this line changes.
Questions
Asked plainly, answered plainly.
Is Steadi a bank?
No.
Can I connect my bank?
No.
Do you sell my spending data?
No.
Is Steadi available in French?
What does it cost?
Start with three envelopes.
Name them, give each a limit, and write down the first thing you buy. That is the entire setup.
Steadi is a budgeting tool. It is not a bank, a payment processor or a card issuer, and it never holds, moves or has access to your money.