Thrifty Thinking: Piglet Budgeting App (iOS)

Piglet is a simple app for iPhone, iPad and iPod that allows you to keep track of your daily, weekly and monthly budget. Piglet does one thing and it does it well: tell you how much you can spend in a 100% hassle-free way. Simply setup a monthly allowance and set your budget and Piglet will calculate the rest for you. I had a chance to interview Geoffroy Vincens, designer of the application.

1. What inspired the launch of Piglet?

The idea comes from my business partner and developer of the application, Ophir. He used to keep track of his budget by dividing his monthly income by the number of days in the month, to have a rough idea of a daily allowance. He tried to explain this trick to his wife, but soon realised they had some issues with tracking the expenses, so he developed a prototype for his personal use to see if an app can help. It did. A couple of months later, we were launching Piglet.

2. What features set it apart from other budgeting apps?

Well, that's the features it doesn't have that sets it apart in our opinion. Every other budget app is trying to be most complete, with the most features, all the way down to pie charts and mortgage calculation. It doesn't work quite well on a smartphone with a tiny screen, as it complicates the user interface unnecessarily, and we think that most people don't need that kind of information on a daily basis anyway. We decided to go for a simple app, but an efficient one. All that Piglet does is giving you an instant view of your current budget, according to a weekly or a monthly allowance that you set up yourself, so that you know how much you can spend without going over the top. And if you go over the top anyway, Piglet notifies you and recalculates you allowance so that you're still on a positive balance by the end of the month. All the barbaric algebra is hidden to the user.

3. Why is it important to use some tool to track budget?

It's quite the same as tracking your weight. You either do it to stay in shape, or with a goal set in mind. You need comparison points in order to improve yourself or to know early on you're doing something wrong, and the habit of writing down your expenses can help you achieve that. We designed Piglet for both these goals. You can use it just for a quick check that you're not overspending, or you can use it with a saving goal in mind. That's why we added the savings / debt progress bar next to the daily and monthly budget bars in the main interface.

4. Are there plans to open it up to other platforms? 

Not in the near future. One of the strengths of our app is that it uses Apple's iCloud to back up the data and synchronise it between your Apple devices. The next step would be to back up the data ourselves on our own servers, so that we can integrate it on others smartphones ecosystems without losing the synching functionalities. We're also thinking about our "power users" that want more powerful tracking features. We're trying to find a way to add them without breaking the simplicity of the app. So no definitive roadmap for now, but rest assured there will be improvements coming in the future.