Frequently asked questions

Phantom Budget is a personal finance app that helps you create a monthly budget, track spending in real time, and build better money habits. It gives you a clear, focused workflow — plan your money, log transactions as you go, and adjust as life changes.

Start by setting up budget categories that match your life and assigning your income to each one. As you spend, log transactions to see what's left in each category. At the end of the month (or anytime), review your spending breakdown and move money between categories to stay on track.

Phantom Budget is a zero-based budgeting app that takes the best of other budgeting apps into a simple unified experience. What truly sets us apart is our commitment to privacy and our commitment to remain a private company and to never sell your data.

As a smaller team, we move faster and respond to user requests for enhancements, bugs, and polish in a way only a small team can. When you tell us something is broken or missing, it goes straight to the people building the product — not through layers of tickets and roadmaps. We've implemented over 90% of customer asks, and in a majority of cases we ship those improvements in less than 48 hours.

No, and that's important feature for us. Without a free tier, we have no incentive to seek other revenue streams like other apps that monitize their free users by tracking you or selling your data to third parties.

Yes. We offer a 14 day free trial with no credit card required. Phantom Budget is currently in closed alpha. We're offering early access at launch pricing — check our pricing page for current plans. No credit card is required to join the waitlist.

Yes. We use industry-standard encryption to protect your data in transit and at rest. We never sell your personal or financial information to third parties. [Placeholder: Add specifics about your hosting, auth provider, or security certifications as appropriate.]

Yes. Currently, you and your partner or spouse will use a single login to share your budget. We're working on adding separate logins for each person in the near future.

No. We don't require you to connect your bank accounts. You can manually enter your transactions as you go.

Not yet as a native App Store or Play Store app — but Phantom Budget is a Progressive Web App (PWA) you can install on your phone today. Once installed, it opens from your home screen like an app, runs full screen, and is built for mobile budgeting.

Install on iOS (Safari): 1. Open phantombudget.com in Safari (other browsers on iOS can't install PWAs). 2. Tap the Share button. 3. Scroll and tap Add to Home Screen. 4. Tap Add.

Install on Android (Chrome): 1. Open phantombudget.com in Chrome. 2. Tap the menu (⋮). 3. Tap Install app or Add to Home screen. 4. Confirm the install.

Native mobile apps are on our roadmap. For additional comments or requests, feel free to comment on this GitHub issue: https://github.com/acjwong/phantom-budget/issues/35

Yes. In Settings → General, use Import data and choose Import from EveryDollar. Sign in to everydollar.com on a desktop browser, run Phantom Budget's export script in DevTools (or paste getBudgetByDate and/or findByDateRange network responses), then upload the JSON in the import wizard. This works without an EveryDollar Premium subscription and preserves split transactions from EveryDollar allocations.

Yes. In Settings → General, use Import data and choose Import from CSV. The wizard explains required columns (date, amount, category), optional fields like payee, group, type, notes, planned, and split_id, then lets you upload or paste a CSV and track multi-month import progress.

Yes. When adding a transaction, tap Scan receipt to open your camera or upload a photo. Phantom Budget uses OCR to read the merchant, total, sales tax, and purchase date, then pre-fills the transaction form so you can review and save — no manual typing required.

You can cancel your account at any time. Your data will be deleted from our servers within 90 days of cancellation. We offer an easy data export feature, but you will need to download your data before cancelling.

Request early access from our homepage. Once you're approved, you'll receive an email with instructions to create your account and set up your first budget. If you have questions along the way, reach out through the Contact page inside the app.

Once you're signed in, use the Contact page in the app sidebar to send us a message. For general inquiries before signing up, reach out to <wonglabs@proton.me>.