Introduction
Our daily lives are being changed by the awareness and minimalism trend. Budgeting for yourself is not an exception.
People today know how important it is to plan their finances well, and the need for personal finance apps is rising. Money apps for phones were worth $573.1 million in 2021, thanks to sales in the US. With $481.9 million, this number is 19% more than 2020.
It’s clear from all of these facts that making a personal finance app is a great business idea that you should not miss!
However, how can it win over users’ hearts and stand out from the other personal budget apps that are out there?
Quick answer: find out what your people want first. There is a more in-depth explanation in this piece.
Let’s get started!
A Few Words About Apps for Personal Finance
One thing that all personal finance apps do is help users keep track of their money. When you make a personal finance app, remember that it should help the user keep track of their income and expenses and handle their money.
Whether it’s a simple app or a difficult product with many uses, it should be able to do the following:
Keeping track of the difference between income and spending and giving analytics once every so often.
But these are the most important things. More “colors” can be added to your banking app by connecting it to more than one payment system. You could also make it more like a game by letting users set buying or saving goals and giving them badges when they reach them.
Two Different Kinds Of Personal Finance Apps
As you work on your personal finance app, you need to think about not only your straight competitors but also the ones that aren’t as clear. Here are two types of personal finance that might not be clear at first.
Banking Apps
Interestingly, banking apps are now competing with personal spending apps. By combining the features of saving achievements and financial analytics, they become a strong rival that offers banking and money management tools in one place.
One example is Alliant Mobile Banking.
Chatbot Assistants
Interestingly, one of your competitors isn’t even an app! Either a banking app or a messaging app has these chatbots built in. Even though they are parasites, they don’t give up features to full-fledged apps. They help with managing the money, making plans, and even giving personal advice.
For example, plum.
The best apps for managing your money on the market
It’s not news that there are a lot of personal finance apps on the market for fintech apps. But Mint, an app with more than 30 million users around the world that helps you handle your money, is one of the big names in this field.
But besides Mint, you should also keep an eye on these other companies:
PocketGuard is a planning app that lets you use budgeting tools for free, with a premium version that lets you add more features.
The Mvelopes app helps people stick to their budgets by keeping track of their money before and after they spend it.
EveryDollar is an easy-to-use app for newbies that helps them make a budget.
4 things that you must have when making a personal finance app
To make a budget app, you need to take a unique method that includes doing a lot of research on business, users, and technology. But because there are so many apps out there, users have become used to getting great service. They won’t settle for anything less, either!
To not let them down, here are some things that I think your personal app service must have based on my own experience:
Visualization Is Important
The eye is the most sensitive part of a person. It’s bad that you can’t do anything about it. The good news is that it’s easy to deal with when you use diagrams or visuals. A great way to help you manage and understand info is to use graphics to show it.
Safety is very important.
In this tech-driven world, giving up some of your privacy to get more rewards is just the way things are. When it comes to health or money, though, things get very touchy. When making a personal finance app, it’s very important to have strong data protection tools.
For more safety, you can use the following tools:
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA);
- End-to-End encryption;
- Instant alerts or messages in case the app does something strange;
- One encryption key that only works for one person;
A secure Know Your Customer (KYC) process checks users’ identities in several steps.
This is our guide to the safest ways to use fintech, along with a free security checklist. Check it out to make sure that your app is completely safe.
It’s normal to be intuitive.
When it comes to something as difficult as money, simplicity is the most valuable thing. For a goal to be truly useful to users, it should be as easy to reach as turning on the TV or letting out the room.
As you work on your app’s flow, you should make sure that it is easy to use and makes sense. You could also hire a group of UX designers who will do a great job for you.
Pro Tip from Appic Softwares:
If you want your UX to be easy for people, you should understand their problems and needs. One more thing: you should know where your users live, what they do during the day, and when they go to sleep. Okay, maybe that’s too much. Find out about your users’ lives before you make your app a part of theirs.
Check out our blog post How To Build A UX Fintech Design With A Human Face? for more UX design tips for fintech apps.
Stay up to date on the new world
As things stand, your banking app should give your users as many options as they need. For example, a lot of people might want to be able to link their cryptocurrency funds to their money management app.
Because cryptocurrencies are becoming so popular, not letting people handle them in your app could be a big problem for you. Also, a leader like Mint lets users keep Bitcoins on their accounts and handle them.
If you’re making a money-related app, you might want to start with Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are very well-known coins.
ways to make a money app for yourself
Deep Discovery: The Key to Making a Successful Personal Finance App
Discovery is an important part of any product development process because it helps you learn more about what people want and how to make their lives easier.
During the discovery part of product development, the team does a lot of research to find out what the limits are and how to get around them.
When it comes to making personal banking apps and other similar apps, Appic Softwares usually does the following kinds of research:
ways to make a money app for yourself
Research on Users
It’s helpful to “grasp” the user’s tone of voice and learn about their problems, wants, and way of life. In this way, we can make a fintech product that fits the users’ lives.
Tech Research
What kinds of tech options do we have? Which APIs should we use, and how will they help us? These are all questions that tech study should be able to answer.
Research for Business
During the business study stage, all the business restrictions that could affect the development process must be looked at. The team will need to do the following to reach their goal:
Problem statement, discussion with stakeholders, research on competitors, business model canvas, and customer journey map (CJM).
During the research phase, you also have to test your ideas and make assumptions.
The discovery stage is important for your fintech business. Learn more about it in our piece, “Building A Fintech App That Stands The Competition.”
Make an app for managing your money.
Things that every budget app needs to have
Researching and trying your app won’t take long, and then you can start making it. You should now have a list of traits that you ‘have to have’. These are the ones you can’t miss:
Authorization and your account
As much as possible, make the process of logging and getting started quick and easy. But keep in mind that it needs to be safe because you’ll be dealing with a lot of personal data.
Users need to have a User’s Profile so that they can store and change all of their personal information.
Tracking income and expenses
Users should be able to manage deals, get to them quickly, and filter the data to only see it for a certain amount of time.
Sorting into groups
This tool lets users organize their spending into groups so they can see and manage their budgets better.
Getting Notified
With Notifications, you can let users know when payments are due or when costs are going up. Besides that, you can make your banking app do other things as well.
Setting your financial goals
This one lets people set any size of cash goals. For instance, putting away $200 a week or making a new money habit.
Integration with other payment and accounting systems
Your financial app can be linked to other financial services to make them easier for users to use and keep up to date.
Every financial app needs to be quick, safe, dependable, and easy to use. The Appic Softwares team can help you make one. See what kinds of financial tools we can make for you.
Extras That Would Be Nice
gaming: To make your finances more fun and interesting, add gaming. You could use tasks, challenges, or other game-like features to get people to save more, spend less, or reach certain financial goals.
Customized financial advice: People like being able to make things their own. Even more so if it saves them cash. It might be a good idea to add a tool that gives users personalized financial advice based on their specific situation.
Social responsibility score: The app could keep track of the carbon footprint of purchases or find companies that don’t treat their workers well and offer alternatives that are better for society.
How to Use Tech Stack and APIs to Make a Personal Finance App
Pick out the tools and technologies you will use to make your personal finance app once you have a list of features you want your budget-tracking app to have. These could be frameworks, libraries, computer languages, or other things.
To make a banking app, you would need the following tech stack:
- Technology stack for a money app
- What APIs do you need to build your personal finance app? The list of APIs you need will depend on the features you want and where the bank you work with is located.
- Most of the time, users are asked to give personal information from a banking app to a personal finance app so that it can look at it.
- The Plaid API is the best choice in this case.
- Appic Softwares can help you make a personal business app.
How Much It Will Cost To Make A Smart Money App In 2022
The price of making a personal banking app depends on several things, such as:
- How hard the features are to use;
- How the partnership works with the team;
- How much do the developers charge per hour?
But let’s say you’re making a normal mobile app. Here’s how the costs will break down if we look at the typical features of this kind of app:
How much does it cost to make an app for dealing with money?
Appic Softwares is an expert in making fintech apps.
After six years of making products, Appic Softwares Product Development Studio has a lot of knowledge. The majority of our work in this training is related to making fintech apps.
In one of the green investment projects that Appic Softwares worked on, for instance, we did a Discovery Stage to learn more about the users’ problems and wants, which kept them from being met. We tested and talked to a lot of people to see if the answer we came up with really worked.
Appic Softwares is also good at giving good technical answers. We did the same thing in the Aspiration case. An app called Aspiration helps people handle their money, keep track of their environmental impact, and give back to the community. In this case, we had to make a way for people to visit the website at any time.
The brave developers at Appic Softwares took on the problem and found a way to solve it: they switched the iOS app from Objective-C to Swift.
At this point, 70% of Aspiration users use the app that Appic Softwares made for them on their phones. Also, the App Store gives it a 4.9+ grade, and 40,000 people use it every month.
We think our success is due to the Product Hypothesis-based method we used. It helps us make an app that is focused on users and helps them reach their goals.
Conclusion
It’s easy to see how making a personal finance app could be a good way to make money. But the standards are pretty high for this kind of app, and that doesn’t even count the competition in the market.
Finding out what users want and need will help you make a very competitive app that people like.
The design and development team at Appic Softwares has been making competitive apps for years, doing a lot of studies and learning about how users feel. We write code, test ideas, talk to people, and help businesses figure out if their products are right for the market.
We at Appic Softwares have worked with companies on other Fintech App Development projects and open API integration projects, so we know how to do this one.
So, what are you waiting for?
Contact us now!
