Picks

Picks is a tab in the bottom bar of every budget. It shows a small grid of Amazon shopping categories that the app picked to fit how you spend, based on the categories and items you set up. Tapping a card opens that category in a new browser tab.

The tab is how the app supports its free tier. When somebody buys something on Amazon after tapping a card, Amazon pays a small commission to us. The price you pay is exactly the price Amazon shows; nothing extra is added to your purchase, and nothing about your bank or transactions is shared with Amazon to choose the cards.

Who sees the Picks tab

Picks is a free-tier feature. The tab appears in the bottom bar of every budget for free-plan users, alongside Setup, Planner, Reports, and History.

Premium subscribers do not see the Picks tab by default. The tab is what funds the free tier through affiliate commissions, so it ships with the free experience and stays out of the Premium experience. Premium subscribers who want to use Picks can switch it on themselves; see Showing the tab on Premium below.

The setting is per user, not per budget. If you share a budget, your collaborators see (or don’t see) Picks based on their own plan and their own choice, not yours.

New empty budgets show the tab in a disabled (greyed-out) state until setup is finished; see Why the tab is disabled below.

How picks are chosen

Picks reads the budget you have open and turns it into a short list of search terms. Two kinds of terms feed in:

• Each of your expense categories counts as a term. A category with more items in it counts a little more heavily.
• The top 25 expense items in the budget, ranked by how much they cost per month, count as terms. The most expensive items count more heavily than smaller ones.

Those terms are run against an internal directory of Amazon shopping categories, and the best-matching cards are shown. The list rebuilds every time you open the tab, so renaming a category, adding a new item, or changing an item’s amount can change what appears the next time you visit.

Income and Transfer categories do not contribute to the search. Only Expense categories and the items in them shape the list.

For example, a budget with a Groceries category, a Streaming category that holds three subscription items, and a Pets category will tend to show category cards for groceries, streaming, and pet supplies. Renaming Streaming to Movies and renaming the items inside it would, on the next visit, shift the cards toward video and entertainment.

If you want different cards, the way to influence them is to update Categories and Items directly. There is no separate setting for what Picks shows.

Affiliate links

The disclosure printed at the top of the tab is the literal version of the relationship: “As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.” The price you pay on Amazon is the same price Amazon would have shown if you arrived from anywhere else. The commission is paid to us by Amazon out of their margin, not by you on top of the price.

Each card opens its category in a new browser tab outside the app. You stay signed in to the app; switching back returns you to the page you left. The link is a normal Amazon page; once you are on Amazon, Amazon’s own privacy and account policies apply.

Privacy and tracking

What goes into choosing a card:

• The names of your expense categories and the names of your top expense items, with how much each one costs per month, are read from the budget you have open.
• Your transactions, account balances, bank login, and payment details are not used to pick the cards. They are not sent to Amazon.
• Artificial intelligence is not used to pick the cards. The matching is a fast database lookup on our server.

What happens when you tap a card:

• The app records that you tapped a card so we can see which categories are useful enough to keep showing. The record is anonymous: it is tied to a temporary session ID that resets after thirty minutes of inactivity, and it does not contain your name, your email address, or anything Amazon could use to identify you back to the app.
• The Amazon page itself sees a normal browser visit. Whatever you do once you are on Amazon (browsing, signing in, buying) is between you and Amazon, under their privacy policy.

Tapping a card does not change anything in your budget. Picks is a one-way browse: the cards send you out to Amazon and never write back into your accounts, transactions, items, or planner.

Why the tab is disabled

On a brand-new budget, the Picks tab appears in the bottom bar but cannot be tapped. The tab stays disabled until the budget has at least one account, at least one category, and at least one item. This is the same rule that keeps Planner and Reports disabled on a new budget: until there is something for the page to read, opening it would only show “No picks yet.”

Once you finish those three setup steps, the Picks tab activates as soon as the new item saves. The page then loads its first set of cards.

If you finish setup but the page still shows “No picks yet. Add more items to your budget to see personalized picks.”, check whether the budget has any Expense categories. Picks builds its list only from expense categories and the items in them, so a budget made up of paychecks (Income) and transfers between accounts (Transfer) has nothing for the search to work from. Adding one Expense category with an item inside it produces cards on the next visit, as long as your category or item name overlaps with one of Amazon’s shopping departments. Very narrow names can fail to match; if that happens, broaden the name (for example, replace “Avocado oil” with “Cooking oil” or place the item under a Groceries category).

Showing the tab on Premium

Premium subscribers do not see the Picks tab by default. To switch it on:

1. Open the hamburger menu and tap Settings.
2. Scroll to the Premium Settings card.
3. Turn off Hide Picks Tab.

The tab appears in the bottom bar right away. Turning the toggle back on hides it again. The setting is saved to your account, so it follows you across devices: switching the tab on from your phone also switches it on in the same account on a tablet or desktop.

Why this default? Premium subscribers do not see Picks by default. Picks is the affiliate-funded part of the free tier. We keep it visible there, where the recommendations help support the app for users who are not paying. Premium subscribers are already supporting the app directly, so the bottom bar starts cleaner for them. Picks is one tap away if you want it.

The Hide Picks Tab toggle only appears on the Premium plan. Free-plan users always see the tab and have no toggle for it.

If your Premium subscription ends, the Picks tab returns to the bottom bar regardless of the toggle, because the hide setting only applies on Premium. Resubscribing later restores whatever choice you had saved: if you had switched Picks on as a Premium subscriber, it stays on; if you had left the default, the tab goes back to hidden.

The Hide Picks Tab toggle does not change anything on the page itself, the affiliate links, or what gets sent to Amazon when you do tap a card. It only controls whether the tab appears in your bottom bar. See Subscription for what else changes when you switch plans.