I Built a Budget App With Zero AI, Zero Backend, Zero Tracking — Here's Why

I Built a Budget App With Zero AI, Zero Backend, Zero Tracking — Here's Why Every few months, I'd build a new budget spreadsheet. Income allocations, category targets, savings goals — the whole thing. It looked great for about two weeks. Then life happened, I stopped updating it, and three months later the plan and reality had completely diverged. Fixing a spreadsheet is tedious enough that most people just… don't. So I built DonFlow — a budget planner that compares what you planned to spend versus what you actually spent. And I made three deliberate choices that go against every current trend. Choice 1: Zero AI I know. In 2025, not using AI in your app feels like refusing to use electricity. But here's the thing: your financial data is the most sensitive data you have. I didn't want it touching any API, any model, any third-party service. More importantly, budget planning isn't an AI problem. It's a discipline problem. You don't need GPT to tell you that you overspent on dining out. Y