I started playing around with Budget Pro at the end of October, initially the landing page and ideas for the design. I’m still very much in the preliminary stages but I don’t think development will take too long as I have the experience of Budget behind me.
Originally, my intent was to take a copy of the Budget code and build all the new features on top and although possible, I’ve realised that long term this just isn’t going to work too well.
Budget is capable but there are two core features which should really be accounted for up front and not tacked on to a working design. Adding support for sharing and multiple budgets means I need to create some sort of “Budget Manager” that knows who owns a Budget and what controls each user has. Additionally, I need a way of surfacing a summary from each Budget rather than just visually as per the free version of Budget.
I’m not going to throw away the Budget code and start again, that would be stupid. The tested Budget service code works well and will just need the odd tweak here and there, it is more about how the service is wrapped and returns data and lessons I’ve learned during the development of Budget.
Budget and Budget Pro are both going to be supported for the foreseeable future, but they are their own products. Budget will get new features and even borrow features from Budget Pro, but it will not become Budget Pro.