Buddy - The Financial Companion Making Budgeting Fun and Easy

Personal Finance
29.11.2022 11:45 am

Buddy is a budgeting and finance app that helps users build and share budgets, track expenses, save effectively, and better understand their overall financial health.

With over 2.5M users, Buddy is the fastest-growing budgeting app on the App Store for Gen Z internationally, garnering 22,000 five-star ratings. It is the most popular app of its kind in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and others, and the second most popular in the US. In 2022, the bootstrapped company surpassed $1M annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Bringing Joy to Budgeting - How Buddy Works

Buddy is on a mission to make budgeting simple and fun, designed with simplicity and intuitiveness at its core. On creating an account, users are asked a series of questions about income, outgoings, and scheduled transactions, before receiving tailored budgets and insights. Buddy users can then set-up recurring transactions for each day, week, or month, in order to have predictive visibility over expenditure.

Buddy offers both a free and premium version of the app, the latter of which costs on average $34.99 per year (just 67¢ a week). The app’s vibrant design and customisable color schemes and logos cater to younger audiences, such as Gen Zers and millennials, with users able to add expenses manually or automatically via users bank (available from January). With tailored notifications, transaction shortcuts for payments, and useful financial tips and tricks, Buddy acts as a personal financial assistant from within your pocket.

Not only are users able to build multiple budgeting plans simultaneously (such as rainy day funds or pots for specific holidays or items) but they are also able to share budgets with other Buddy users, be they partners, friends, family members, or roommates.

This shareability was the initial inspiration for the concept of the app, back in 2017. CEO and Founder, Olle Lind, had moved in with his partner and for the first time had a shared household economy to manage.

“The idea for Buddy came when I started living with my girlfriend. I tried a number of budgeting apps to help with our newly collective finances, but none of them catered to what I wanted. Either the user experience was clunky, or they weren’t customisable to an individual’s needs. I wanted to make something sharp, simple, fun and visually appealing, while also collaborative.”

A One-Man Team Saving People Thousands

A solopreneur, Olle Lind built Buddy as a passion project while simultaneously working full-time as a software engineer. Three years after launching the app, and having taken on no external investment nor spending on any paid marketing, Buddy was selected as Apple’s App of the Day in Europe in 2018, and in just one week received more downloads (90k) than the entire previous year.

“That was when I decided to quit my day job as a software engineer. I realized not just the extent of the demand for a product like Buddy, but the meaningful impact it could have worldwide. Young people today are growing up in a dramatically different economic landscape to their parents and grandparents. Home-ownership is far from a given, and we are about to enter a prolonged period of economic uncertainty and expensive living costs.

“Tools such as Buddy can provide young people with the acumen and information to live sustainable financial lives. If we’re able to play a small part in helping someone save for a house or that holiday they’ve always wanted to go on, then building Buddy will have been worth it. I think that’s why so many people around the world have chosen to put our app in their pocket.”

Financial Support for Future Generations

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, American consumers pay more than $250 in overdraft fees each year. With many banks charging anywhere from $30-$50 everytime a person goes into their overdraft, financial overviews and flexibility can make all the difference to young people trying to live within their means.

These kinds of financial pressures are felt even more acutely during times of cost of living crises and global economic uncertainty. With increasing inflation, expensive gas prices, a volatile housing market, and a looming international recession, 2023 will certainly be a year of financial hardship. During such turbulent times, Buddy aims to not only help people get control over their budgets, but to educate them on how to make responsible decisions around spending and saving. This is especially pressing for younger people, with a 2021 report from the TIAA Institute and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC) at the George Washington University (GW) School of Business showing Gen Zers to have the lowest levels of financial literacy of any generation.

Buddy has recently teamed up with savings experts on TikTok to educate young people about budgeting and reduce financial anxiety. The app is available globally, and is translated into 13 languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish).