Patrick B

One of the biggest pain points when adopting a new personal finance application is recategorizing all your transactions. We did not want users to have to start training a new system from an empty database.

That is why Big Picture Money ships with a separate merchants database. On day one, common payees can already resolve to a recognizable merchant and a sensible default category. Everything runs locally and you do not need to reach out to a web service to categorize transactions.

2026.1.12 is our General Availability release. Big Picture Money is out of beta: you can buy a perpetual license on the pricing page, download the installer for your operating system right away, and own your ledger on your machine.

Below are the highlights. See the full changelog for every feature and fix in this build.

Performance is a feature. Keeping performance fast and responsive is a major goal of Big Picture Money.

In applications, a common area of performance constraints is scrolling through large lists of data. For instance, a transaction register with 40,000 transactions -- years of groceries, rent, paychecks, and transfers -- each row needs layout work: columns, text, click targets, menus, icons, and more.

2026.1 is out. Below are the major features that landed. See the full changelog for all the features and bug fixes that made it in.

Somewhere along the way, almost everything I use became a subscription.

Not just the big tools — the little ones too. A few dollars here for a note app. A few more there for password sync. Another monthly charge for something I open twice a year. Alone, each fee feels small. Together they are a drip that never stops, and I got tired of paying rent on software I already decided I wanted.