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Budget Pro Alpha

Screenshot of the Budget Pro budget overview and test saying "Budget Pro is Budget on steroids - it's everything you love about Budget improved in every way. More viewing options, more controls, you name it."

We released Budget into beta last year, the official release happened in January. We have consistently stated that Budget Pro will be released within the first half of 2023. As of the time of writing, 29th May 2023, everything is on track. The first alpha of Budget Pro should be ready before the end of June.

Taking it slow

We took our time releasing Budget, the beta was launched in November 2022. We spent two months responding to feedback before the official release in January 2023. This approach is working for Budget so we are going to do the same thing with Budget Pro, but we are going to take even more time.

Our plans for Budget Pro

If everything goes to plan, the alpha will be released soon. We are aiming for an alpha, beta and then the official release. Other than the planned date for the alpha, we are not committing to any further times or release dates, Budget Pro will be ready when it is done.

The alpha will have all the features of Budget as well as additional viewing options and custom user settings. The beta release will include all the features listed on the features page and anything we think of in the meantime. The official release will only be tagged after an extended testing and bug fixing period.

We are going to invite a small number of users to the alpha and leave it open to public registrations. All users who sign up to the alpha or beta will be gifted a subscription once we get to the official release. We haven’t yet decided on the length of the gifted subscriptions but we do want to show our appreciation to our early users.

We can’t wait to release Budget Pro. I’m pleased with Budget, our free and open-source budgeting App, but Budget Pro is on a whole other level. It does so much more than Budget, the viewing options alone massively increase the usefulness of the tool.

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Delegate tasks

A man is holding up a sign with the words "Do you delegate enough???"

Delegate non-vital tasks to other tools and services, you’ll thank me later, now the blog post.

Two years ago, I started delegating non-core tasks to paid services. The goal was to have more time to focus on development, I was sick of occasionally losing an entire day to some dev ops tasks. I was sick of even having to list them in my project management App.

I want to use my limited time to focus on the development, marketing, documentation, and everything else required for my Apps. I’m trying to launch a side business; that’s hard enough to do in your free time with small children, I don’t need “unnecessary” work as well.

Web servers

I used to use Azure to host all my projects and as easy as it is to use as Azure, it gets complicated quickly. When you have multiple Apps, need to manage SSL, CDN, MySQL, Redis and everything else, it starts taking up some serious time.

Eventually I’d had enough. I was also starting to get a little irritated with the price, Azure is not cheap. I contemplated AWS but decided no, I wanted something different. I’ve also read one too many horror stories of people almost going broke when they don’t set the correct spending limits on AWS.

I wanted a simpler life, so I thought ok, I’ll delegate the task and try Laravel Forge, I don’t want to have to manage anything.

All my sites were moved from Azure to Laravel Forge (Linode) in a weekend. I also took the opportunity to move some more of my domain names away from GoDaddy.

I was surprised at how different things were, particularly how quick and easy it was to get each of my Apps running. It only takes a few minutes to commission a server, point to a repo, deploy, and install an SSL certificate, it is incredible. I switched to Laravel Forge and Linode two years ago, I’ve never had a reason to think about switching to anything else.

Status Pages

It is a good idea to have a status page for your Apps, if something isn’t correctly working your customers at least have something to check before reaching out. There are countless ways to create a status page, you can do everything from a page which does a 200 check for each site to full-on integration.

It is easy to create a simple status page, but again, why bother? I searched around for a tool/service and found ‘oh dear.’ Initially I only signed up to create a status page but over time their offering has increased and I’m using all their features.

I don’t need to worry about maintaining my own status page and know when I get an email from oh dear, it means there is an issue I need to look at.

Delegate

This post is not about Laravel Forge, oh dear, Stripe, Freshbooks, TailwindUI or any other service I use personally.

If there are any tasks which you can afford to delegate to another service or tool, go for it.

We all have limited time so use it effectively. Concentrate on the stuff which relates to whatever your goal is, let others worry about the rest.