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A budget app with a real iPhone home screen widget
Envelope Budget ships a WidgetKit extension with home-screen faces, Lock Screen accessory widgets (circular, rectangular and inline) and a Live Activity that shows what is left plus up to three quick-log shortcuts. Adding the widget and all five faces (Ring, Quick Add, Combo, Goal, Vision Board) are free; style variants and accent color are Plus. Add it by long-pressing an empty part of the home screen until the icons jiggle, tapping the plus or Edit control, choosing Envelope Budget, then picking a face and an envelope.
A balance is only useful before you pay
Almost every budgeting failure happens in the ninety seconds before a purchase, not afterwards. By the time you open an app to check, you have usually already decided. A widget is the only surface that puts the number in front of you without you choosing to look, which is why it does more work than any screen inside the app. The behavior it produces is narrow but real: you glance at the tile, see that the restaurant envelope has less in it than you assumed, and the decision changes while it can still change. Nothing about this requires a widget from us specifically. It requires a widget you actually look at, showing a number you actually trust.
What ours shows, and what it costs
The home-screen faces are Ring, Quick Add, Combo, Goal and Vision Board: an envelope's remaining balance with a progress ring, one-tap shortcuts into logging a spend, a combined view, a savings goal's progress, and your vision board image. On the Lock Screen the accessory families are supported too, so you get a circular gauge, a rectangular bar or a single inline line above the clock. There is also a Live Activity that shows what is left along with up to three quick-log shortcuts while a session is running. Adding the widget is free and all five faces are free. What Plus buys is the dressing: the style variants and the accent color inside the widget editor. Nothing about reading your own numbers sits behind the paywall.
How to add it
Long-press an empty area of your home screen until the icons start to jiggle. Tap the plus button or the Edit control at the top of the screen, depending on your iOS version, and choose Add Widget. Search for Envelope Budget, swipe through the faces, pick the size you want, and drop it where your thumb naturally lands, which for most people is the bottom row rather than the top. Then tap the placed widget once to configure it and choose which envelope it points at. For the Lock Screen, long-press the Lock Screen, tap Customize, choose the widget area, and add the accessory face there. If the widget appears empty on first placement, open the app once so it has data to hand over.
The fair comparison with syncing apps
Bank-syncing budget apps can offer widgets too, and theirs have a genuine advantage over ours: they can show a balance you did not have to log anything to produce. If you will not log purchases, an imported number beats a hand-entered one that is three days stale, every time. The counter is narrower than it sounds. An imported balance lags, because it depends on the transaction clearing and the feed refreshing, and the specific moment a budget needs to be right is the moment before the purchase that has not happened yet. Which failure mode you can live with is the actual decision. We are not claiming any particular app lacks a widget; feature sets change, and yours may already have one worth using.
The change to make: two envelopes, on the home screen
Do not put your whole budget on the home screen. Put the two envelopes that actually cause the problem, which for most people are groceries and eating out, and leave everything else inside the app. Two tiles you read are worth more than eight you stop seeing. Then attach the check to a moment rather than an intention: before you pay, not at the end of the day. That is the same mechanic /guides/stop-overspending-in-one-category is built around, and the widget exists mainly to make it cheap enough to keep doing. If after two weeks you never glance at the tile, the widget is not your problem and manual entry probably is not either.
Common questions
Do I need Plus to use the widget?
No. Adding a widget is free, and all five faces are free: Ring, Quick Add, Combo, Goal and Vision Board. The Lock Screen accessory widgets are part of that too. Plus buys the styling inside the widget editor, meaning the style variants and the accent color, plus other things unrelated to widgets such as unlimited envelopes and file export. The rule we hold ourselves to is that reading your own numbers, on any surface, stays free; the paywall covers headroom, dressing and getting data out.
Does the widget update by itself, or do I have to open the app?
It reflects what you have logged, and it refreshes without you opening the app, but iOS decides when. Widgets on iPhone are budgeted by the system, so a fresh number can take a few minutes to appear rather than landing instantly. The bigger caveat is upstream of that: the widget can only show purchases you have actually recorded. There is no bank connection, so a spend you have not logged does not exist to the widget any more than it exists to the app.
What does the Live Activity do?
It puts the envelope you are currently working against on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island while a session is running, showing what is left, a progress ring, and up to three quick-log shortcuts so you can record a spend without unlocking into the app. It is the shortest path between paying for something and logging it, which matters because the gap between those two moments is where manual entry usually dies. It requires a recent iOS version, since Live Activities are not available on older releases.
Can I put a widget on my iPad or Mac?
No. Envelope Budget is an iPhone app. There is no iPad-optimized version, no Mac app and no web app, so the widgets are iPhone home screen and Lock Screen only. If you want your budget on a larger screen or on a desktop, that is a real reason to choose a different tool, and we would rather you know now than find out after installing. Our Excel and PDF export, which is a Plus feature, is the only way our data reaches another device.
Run this budget on your phone
Envelope Budget puts these envelopes in your pocket. Assign every amount, log spending as it happens, and see what is actually left.
Get Envelope BudgetiPhone · manual entry, no bank connection · 7-day free trial