What is a personal finance app?

A personal finance application is a web or mobile application that helps users manage their day-to-day finances. Personal finance apps typically include features such as integrated bill pay, budgeting tools, and investment trackers. Personal finance apps are often categorized as “budgeting” or “spending” applications. Budgeting applications emphasize managing daily spending. Spending applications, on the other hand, emphasize tracking purchases and income over a long period of time to visualize patterns in spending behavior (e.g., identify areas for savings). Personal finance apps are often also banking apps, budgeting apps, and expense tracking apps. Popular personal finance applications include Mint, Quicken, and YNAB. Examples of personal finance apps built with Crowdbotics:

• A financial tracking app. App will allow people to add tags to purchases to categorize their finances into categories. Users can connect their credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts. IOS/Android app only.
• A financial advisor app. App is going to be similar to MintAPI that lets customers sign into all their banks and pull over info from them. Subscription based, 3 or 4 options to start all around Financial consulting or financial review.
• A financial app that would allow users to set their own financial goals. The app would be able to track how much they currently have on their account. It would also allow them to withdraw money from the same bank account they used to deposit it.

What is the typical cost to build a personal finance app?

A personal finance app usually costs about $37,500 to build. However, the total cost can be as low as $25,000 or as high as $50,000. A personal finance app with a low number of features (also known as a minimum viable product, or MVP) will be more affordable than an app that includes all intended functionality. For example, here are some previous personal finance app price quotes from Crowdbotics:

• $55,000
• $22,500
• $27,500

How long does it take to build a personal finance app?

A personal finance app usually takes 467 hours to build. However, a personal finance app can be built in as few as 267 hours, or in as many as 800 hours. The exact timeline mostly depends on how complicated your specific app is. As a general rule, it will take longer if you require highly custom designs, niche features, complex logic, or non-standard release platforms. For example, some previous personal finance apps build with Crowdbotics received the following hourly estimates:

• 733
• 300
• 367

How to successfully grow your personal finance application

A personal finance app can grow rapidly by demonstrating that it provides a high level of value for a specific type of user. There are many personal finance apps on the market today, and users choose their personal finance apps based on the platforms that speak directly to their needs. Personal finance apps need to show that they understand the financial goals of a target audience and also must demonstrate that there is a large pool of eligible users already on the platform.

Risks and challenges of building a personal finance application

A personal finance app deals with the sensitive information of its users, which opens it up to privacy and security risks. This type of application should aim to protect user data from unauthorized access and offer robust data backup mechanisms to prevent data loss. It is recommended that developers consider using common encryption standards for exchanging data between the app and their servers.