Introducing the Horiza blog

Horiza is a personal finance app you fill in yourself. No bank connection, no aggregator sitting in the middle holding your credentials. That constraint shapes everything about the product, and it turns out it is worth writing about.

Why write at all

Most budgeting advice assumes a bank connection. It assumes your transactions arrive on their own, that categories are something you correct after the fact, and that the interesting question is how to visualise what already happened.

Horiza starts from the opposite place: you decide what money is for before you spend it, and you write down what you spent as you spend it. That is envelope budgeting, an idea much older than any app, and it produces a different set of problems worth writing about.

What will be here

Three kinds of post, roughly:

• The method. Envelope budgeting in practice — what to do when a category runs out mid-month, how to handle irregular income, when to split a category and when to merge two.
• The parts most apps skip. Instalment plans, buy now pay later, more than one currency, and credit cards whose statement day and due date are not the same thing.
• How it is built. The engineering decisions, including the ones that were wrong the first time.

On honesty

Two things will not appear here: invented numbers, and claims the product cannot back up. If a post describes a feature, that feature exists. If something is planned but unbuilt, it will say so plainly.

That extends to the uncomfortable parts. The privacy page already says what this site does and does not collect, and the same standard applies to anything written here.

Questions this post answers

What will the Horiza blog cover?

Envelope budgeting, instalment plans, handling more than one currency, and the engineering decisions behind a personal finance app that connects to no bank.

Do I need a Horiza account to read it?

No. Everything published here is public and free to read. Horiza itself is invite-only for now, but the writing is not.