Key Facts

• The author used the Cashew app, a free, open-source expense tracker, to monitor her finances and identify areas where she could cut costs, replacing her previous paid app, You Need A Budget (YNAB).
• The author discovered that she was spending $50 monthly on seven streaming platforms, including YouTube Premium, Apple TV+, DStv, Spotify, Netflix, PlayStation Plus, and Deezer, which accounted for a significant portion of her expenses.
• After using Cashew to track her expenses, the author was able to downsize to four streaming services, Netflix, PlayStation Plus, Spotify, and DStv, saving $23 a month, and also cut back on costly apps and filled gaps in her viewing experience with locally saved media files.
• The Cashew app offers various features, including a home screen that allows users to log income and expenses, a calendar icon to adjust the date and time, and a Notes field to detail the specifics of a charge, as well as an experimental Intelligence toggle for adding transactions with natural language using Google Gemini.
• The author considered upgrading to the lifetime tier of $12 for the Cashew Pro plan, which offers unlimited tracking across more than one budget simultaneously, full statistics with deeper financial breakdowns of past periods, more customization options, and extended history comparisons spanning multiple months.