Allot.in Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes Allot.in unique?

   Allot has no bank sync, and that's the design rather than a missing feature. There's no account, no login, and no server holding your financial history — everything lives in your browser's own IndexedDB, and the app works fully offline through a Service Worker. Optional cloud sync exists for multiple devices, but data is encrypted with AES-GCM-256 on your device before a single byte leaves it, so the sync server stores ciphertext it cannot read. The app ships with zero runtime dependencies: no framework, nothing third-party executing against your financial data. Pricing follows from the architecture — with no aggregator fees and no per-user server cost, $49 once is sustainable rather than a promotional trick.

2. Why should a person choose Allot.in over its competitors?

   Allot is the better choice on three specific things. Price: $49 once, against roughly $109/year for the category leader, with no renewal. Privacy: there is no account to breach and no server holding your transactions, so the guarantee is architectural, not a policy promise. Longevity: when Mint shut down, millions lost years of history because a company stopped running a server — Allot has no server to shut down, and your data sits in your own browser regardless of what happens to us. If automatic bank sync is essential, Actual Budget or Lunch Money will serve you better — Allot is manual entry and always will be.

3. How would you describe the primary audience of Allot.in?

   People who already know they want envelope budgeting and have hit one of two walls: the subscription price, or handing a third party read access to their bank account. In practice that's ex-YNAB and ex-Mint users, privacy-conscious people who won't link accounts to an aggregator, and anyone who prefers software they own outright over software they rent. There's also a meaningful group who find manual entry to be the point rather than the cost — typing a transaction makes you notice it in a way an auto-categorised feed never does.

4. What's the story behind Allot.in?

   Envelope budgeting works — you assign every unit of currency to a category before you spend it, and you stop wondering where your money went. But every app that does it well also stores your entire financial history on someone else's server, and the market leader charges $109/year for the privilege.

   The question I kept returning to: why does a tool that exists to help me save money need to see my data at all?

   The Mint shutdown sharpened it. Millions lost years of financial history, not to a breach but because a company simply stopped running the server. If your data lives in someone else's database, you're renting access to it even if you paid once. So Allot was built around a single rule with no exceptions: financial data stays in the browser. Every technical decision follows from it — IndexedDB rather than an API, a Service Worker for offline, no auth because there's no account, and end-to-end encryption before anything syncs.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building Allot.in?

   • Vanilla JavaScript — no React, Vue or Svelte, and zero runtime dependencies
   • IndexedDB via a thin wrapper (AllotDB), seven object stores
   • Service Worker, cache-first, for full offline use as an installable PWA
   • Web Crypto API — AES-GCM-256 with PBKDF2 key derivation for optional end-to-end encrypted sync
   • Cloudflare Pages for hosting; Cloudflare Workers for license validation and the zero-knowledge sync relay
   • A from-scratch bank statement parser (CSV/PDF) that runs entirely client-side
   • Jest and Playwright for unit and end-to-end testing