Breaking through the budgeting app market
Hey everyone,
You may remember me from asking for pre-launch feedback on my first app, Winnie, the budgeting app alternative and savings tracker!
The core tenet of Winnie is that budgeting apps suck at actually getting people to save money because they focus entirely on tracking what you SPEND, which has zero measurable effect on saving for long term (or short term) goals.
Meanwhile writing down and tracking what you SAVE predicts both saving behaviour and financial behaviour. This is what Winnie encourages and focuses on.
Traditional budgeting is very taxing psychologically as it is focussed on trying to hit every single category of spending and saving what it is left over while feeling guilty for every category they overspend on.
It is psychologically easier for someone to pay themselves first. This will be familiar to anyone who’s read the Canadian finance book, The Wealthy Barber. The idea is to set a goal of “I need to save $730 this month” and pay yourself that amount from your pay checks and then spend the rest of the money on whatever you want! You no longer need to track every single dollar that goes out.
As long as you hit your savings goals, you can buy whatever else you want without guilt!
It’s been 1 month since launching and I’ve officially made my first $132 from my app (CA$181)
Here are some of my learnings.
- App Store screenshots matter a lot and I wasted my initial “Apple boost” on screenshots that look pretty, but didn’t tell the user what my app did in the first 3 screens
- Because of this, my conversion rate for the first 3 weeks was 0.8%, far below where it should be
- In the last two weeks I’ve updated my screenshots to what you see in the current listing where you see the three main features of the app as well as social proof from my first review
- My conversion rate has jumped to ~3.8% which for an insanely crowded market like finance/budgeting/savings apps is something I am happy with
- I launched as a subscription model since that’s what everyone in this space seemed to be doing. I had a $6.99/week $34.99/year or $69.99 lifetime purchase and sold one single lifetime purchase with zero trial conversions on the subscription plan. I knew something had to change
- I also asked for feedback from users directly who did not renew their trial and they said they were burned out on subscriptions and $70 was too much for what my app did to buy lifetime which I agree with
- I pivoted my model completely to a single lifetime purchase of $14.99 and have seen purchases slowly ramp up over the last week
- Going to keep going and my next step is run meta ads to get more eyeballs on the app to collect more data
The app: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/winnie-savings-tracker/id6759258902
The website: https://www.winnie-app.com/
Posted May 23, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC