Learn - Themes and Icons

Changing the colors and icons, per budget.

Themes and Icons

Themes change the colors of a budget. Icon sets change the icons on accounts, categories, and items. Both are picked per budget, so a personal budget can run dark and minimal while a household budget runs bright and colorful in the same app, without affecting each other.

This page covers picking a theme or icon set, creating your own, generating one with AI, publishing to the community library, backing up your work, and stepping back from a theme without removing it from budgets that already use it.

Picking a theme or icon set is free. Choosing any theme or icon set, including community ones, costs nothing. Creating your own custom theme by hand is also free. The Premium tier covers two things: AI Theme Generation (describe a vibe, get a full color palette generated for you) and Community Publishing (release your work to the public library under your username). See Subscription.

Where to find them

Open the hamburger menu. Two items, near the middle:

Themes opens the Themes page.
Icons opens the Icon Sets page.

Each page has a tab bar with My Themes / Community (or My Icons / Community). The “My” tab is your personal library. The Community tab is the public library, where every theme or icon set published by anyone in the app is browsable, searchable, sortable, and likable.

You can also pick a theme or icon set without going to those pages. Open a budget’s Edit Budget dialog (from the Budgets list) and tap the Theme row or the Icon Set row. That opens a picker scoped to your library plus the community.

Picking a theme

In the Edit Budget dialog, tap the Theme row. The picker opens with a Select Theme title and two segments: My Themes and Community.

The first option in either segment is always Default Theme (“Use the system default theme”), which clears any custom theme on the budget. Below it, your saved themes (or the public library) appear as a radio list. Tap any theme to apply it; the dialog closes immediately and the budget shows the new colors.

In the Community segment, each row has a bookmark toggle and a like button on the right. Bookmarking saves the theme into a personal Bookmarked filter on the page; liking is a public count that other users see. Neither installs the theme; both are persistent across devices.

The right-side note in the Edit Budget row shows the current selection: the saved theme’s name, Custom when you have an unsaved local theme on the budget, or Default when no custom theme is set.

The Icon Set row in Edit Budget works the same way. The picker title is Select Icon Set, the segments are My Icons and Community, and the default option is Default Icons (“Use the system default icons”).

What’s inside a theme

A theme covers two visually distinct things:

UI colors. Backgrounds, text, borders, primary and secondary accents, status colors (success, warning, danger, info), grid colors. The shape and tone of the app.
Palette. A list of 8 to 12 colors used to color-code categories, accounts, and chart series. The palette is what gives every category in your sunburst chart its own ring color and every account in your list a consistent identity.

Both light and dark variants of the UI colors are stored in the same theme, and the Light/Dark toggle in Settings chooses which variant the app uses. The palette is shared between variants.

Why this default? The palette is part of the theme, not the icon set. Palette colors are applied to icons at render time, not baked into the icon files. A single icon set can look completely different under different themes (warm earth tones versus cool neons), and you do not have to recolor the icons to change the look. Edit a theme, and every icon in every budget that uses it picks up the change.

Creating a theme

On the Themes page, switch to My Themes and tap New Theme in the toolbar. The New Theme dialog opens with two modes at the top: Manual and AI Generated.

Manual mode

Type a name (required, up to 50 characters) and an optional description. Below those, the color editor lists every UI color, grouped (Background and Surface, Text Colors, Borders and Dividers, Primary Brand, Secondary Brand, Tertiary Brand, Status Colors, Grid, and Category and Chart Colors). A Light / Dark segment at the top of the editor lets you switch between the two variants; each variant’s colors are edited independently, so you set every color twice if you want both modes to look distinct.

Tap any color row to edit the hex value. Save when the theme looks right; it lands in your My Themes library and is immediately available in the picker.

Generating a theme with AI

Switch the segment to AI Generated. The form changes:

A toggle picks between Integrated AI (Premium) and Bring Your Own AI (Free).
A Theme Name field, required.
A Style Preset dropdown with twenty preset styles (Americana, Candy Pink, Christmas, Classic, Easter, Fuchsia, Halloween, Mechanic, Minimal, Modern, Neon, New Years, Playful, Primary, Professional, Rustic, Thanksgiving, Tropical, Tuxedo, Vibrant). Each one has a one-line description of the look.
A Description field. Required if no preset is picked, optional if one is. Use it to add a vibe (“warm mid-century earth tones,” “high-contrast cyberpunk neons”) or to refine the chosen preset.

With Integrated AI, the app sends your description and the chosen preset to its built-in AI service and generates a full theme (UI colors and palette, both light and dark variants) in about a minute or two. The dialog shows a progress indicator with the message “Usually takes 1-2 minutes” while it runs. When it finishes, the new theme is saved to your library automatically, and a follow-up dialog titled Theme Created Successfully! asks which of your existing budgets you would like to apply it to.

Generating a theme with Integrated AI costs about 2 credits, drawn from the Premium Subscriber Credits allowance that comes with Premium. The included allowance is 300 credits per billing cycle, so theme generation by itself never depletes it (2 credits per theme works out to roughly 150 generations per cycle, well beyond what most users would run). See Subscription for the full picture.

With Bring Your Own AI, the dialog generates a structured prompt you copy into your own AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, anything that can return JSON). Paste the AI’s reply back into the dialog and the app validates it and saves the theme. Free, but more steps. Useful if you already have an AI subscription and prefer to use that quota.

Why this default? Bring Your Own AI is free. Generating a theme with the app’s Integrated AI uses Premium Subscriber Credits, which come with a Premium subscription. With Bring Your Own AI, the AI work happens on the chatbot you already use, so the app charges nothing. The trade-off is the copy-and-paste round trip, and the response has to come back in the right shape; the dialog tells you if it does not. See Subscription for the privacy summary on each path.

If a generated theme does not fit, run the generator again with a different description, or open the saved theme and edit the colors by hand. Generated themes behave the same as manual themes once they are saved.

Editing a saved theme

On the My Themes tab, tap a theme to select it, then tap Edit Theme in the toolbar (or double-tap the row). The Edit Theme dialog opens; it is the same color editor used for manual creation, with the name and description fields editable too.

A community theme you applied to your budget cannot be edited from the Community tab; the toolbar shows View Theme instead, and the colors are read-only. To customize a community theme, save a copy to your library first (see Backing up and restoring a theme).

A published theme is also read-only, including for you. Publishing locks the theme at the version you released. To make a tweaked version, save a copy back to your library and iterate on that.

Backing up and restoring a theme

A theme on My Themes can be saved to a .json file with the Download Theme toolbar button. Pick the theme, tap Download Theme, and the app saves the file to your device. The file holds the full theme: every UI color, every palette entry, both light and dark variants.

To bring a theme back from a backup, switch to My Themes and tap Restore Theme in the toolbar. A dialog walks you through three steps:

File. Drop a .json (or .zip) backup file onto the upload area, or click to browse. Theme backups have to be 20 KB or smaller; anything bigger is rejected with a clear error.
Details. Pick a name. The app suggests one based on the file (and adds a number suffix if the name already exists in your library).
Confirm. Review and save. A new theme appears in your library.

Why this default? Restoring always creates a new theme. The dialog does not have a “restore over the top” mode. Each restore makes a fresh, private copy, so you cannot accidentally overwrite the theme you are working in today. If your goal is to roll a theme back to an earlier state, restore the backup as a new theme, look at it, and only then apply or copy what you want into your live theme by hand.

Restored themes are always private, even if the file came from a published community theme.

If you want to back up an entire budget (accounts, categories, items, and balances), that is a separate flow on the Budgets list. See Your Account.

Creating an icon set

Switch to the Icon Sets page (the Icons item in the hamburger menu). On My Icons, tap New Icon Set. The New Icon Set dialog asks for:

Name, required, up to 50 characters.
Style, required, up to 100 characters. A short description of the visual style (“minimalist line icons with rounded corners,” “hand-drawn pastels”). The app uses this when generating new icons in the set with AI.
Line Thickness: Thin, Medium, or Thick.
Corner Smoothing: a slider from 0% to 100%, sharp corners to fully rounded.
Include Default Icons toggle. When on, the set is seeded with the app’s full default icon set so you can replace or remove individual icons later. When off, the set starts empty and you build it up icon by icon.

After saving, the page opens the icon set’s detail view, where you add or edit icons individually. You can pick from the built-in icon library or generate new icons with AI. AI icon generation uses Icon Generation Credits, which are purchased separately from the Premium Subscriber Credits used by AI Theme Generation. See Subscription for the pack prices, the per-icon cost (1 credit Fast, 2 credits Standard, 3 credits High), and the 90-day pack expiration.

A published icon set must have at least 20 icons. The default-seeded option clears that bar on its own; an empty set needs at least 20 manually added or generated before the Publish button will let you go.

Downloading an icon set

The Icon Sets page has a Download Icon Set toolbar button on both segments. Pick an icon set, tap it, and the app saves a ZIP file containing a manifest plus every icon as an SVG. The dialog notes: “You can use your icons however you’d like.”

For an icon set you downloaded from the Community tab, the ZIP includes a CC0 license header so it is clear the icons are public domain. For an icon set from your own library, the icons are yours; the same ZIP comes out without the CC0 header.

There is no Restore Icon Set button in the app. The ZIP is for using the icons elsewhere, not for re-creating an icon set inside the app from a file. To get a community icon set back into your library, install it from the Community tab; to keep your own icon sets, leave them in your library.

Publishing a theme or icon set

Publishing makes a theme or icon set available to every other user in the app’s community library, attributed to your username. It is a deliberate, permanent action.

On the My Themes tab (or My Icons for icon sets), select an item you have created and tap Publish Theme (or Publish Icon Set). A confirmation dialog opens with four things you need to know:

Released under CC0. Your work goes into the public domain. Anyone can use, modify, or share it freely without attribution or permission. The dialog includes a View CC0 License link.
Revoked. After publishing, you can no longer edit or delete the theme or icon set, even from your own library. It is fixed at the version you published.
Moves to Community. It leaves your My Themes / My Icons view and appears in the Community tab and on your public profile.
Permanent. If you delete your account later, your published work stays in the community as “Unknown User” so the people who installed it can keep using it.

You need a username before you can publish. If you do not have one, the dialog tells you to set one and shows an Edit Profile button. Icon sets additionally need at least 20 icons; if yours has fewer, the dialog tells you how many more to add.

Why this default? Publishing is one-way. A published theme cannot be unpublished, even by you. Once it is in the community, other users may have already installed it; pulling it out from under them would break their budgets. To make a tweaked version, save a copy from the Community tab back into your library, edit there, and publish the new version separately.

What CC0 means

CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) puts the work into the public domain. Anyone can use it for personal or commercial work, modify it, or redistribute it, without asking and without crediting you. The trade-off is reach: a CC0 theme can spread far without legal friction. If you would prefer to keep a theme private, do not publish it.

The Community tab lists everything published, sorted by Popular, Most Liked, Most Recent, Most Downloaded, or filtered to your bookmarks. Your own published work also shows up on your public profile page, alongside any public budgets you have shared. See Your Public Profile.

Revoking a theme or icon set

Revoke is a separate flow from Publish. It permanently relinquishes your edit and delete control over a theme or icon set, without releasing it to the community. After revoking, the theme stays in My Themes as read-only, every budget that already uses it keeps working, and you can still publish it later if you change your mind.

Pick the theme on My Themes and tap Revoke Theme in the toolbar. The confirmation dialog spells out exactly what changes:

You lose edit access. You cannot edit or delete the theme any more.
Shared access continues. Everyone with access to a budget that uses the theme keeps seeing it.
You can still publish. Revoking does not block publishing later.

Why this default? Revoke is for stepping back without releasing. Publishing locks edit access AND drops the work into the public CC0 library. Revoking locks edit access without the public release. The use case is “I am done changing this and I want to make sure I do not break it for the budgets I share with my family,” not “I want everyone in the app to install it.”

The same flow exists for icon sets via Revoke Icon Set.

Deleting a theme or icon set

On My Themes, select a theme and tap Delete Theme. A confirmation dialog asks if you are sure; budgets currently using the theme will revert to the default theme.

If the theme is in use on one or more budgets when you tap Delete, a different dialog opens first: Theme In Use. The header reads “Cannot Delete,” lists the budgets you have access to that use this theme, and offers two ways forward:

Download Backup First. Saves the theme to a .json file before you delete, so you can restore it later (see Backing up and restoring a theme). Use this if you might want it back.
Delete Anyway. Force-deletes the theme; the budgets fall back to the default.

The same in-use warning fires for icon sets: title Icon Set In Use, same options.

A published theme cannot be deleted; the toolbar shows Cannot delete revoked theme and disables the button. The same goes for a revoked theme; once you have given up edit access, delete is off the table too.

Themes on shared budgets

Each budget gets one theme and one icon set, and both are tied to the budget, not to the user who applied them. Anyone with access to the budget sees the same theme and icon set. Changing the theme on a shared budget changes it for every collaborator.

The theme itself belongs to whoever created it. If your spouse owns the budget but you applied one of your themes to it, only you can edit or delete that theme. If they want a different look, they can apply a different theme to the same budget; that does not affect your library.

If you delete a theme that a shared budget is using, that budget reverts to the default theme for everyone on it. The in-use warning above tells you how many budgets that affects before you confirm.

What changes if Premium ends

Themes and icon sets in your library are yours. They stay in My Themes and My Icons after a Premium cancellation, and any budget that already uses one keeps showing it.

What changes when Premium ends:

AI Theme Generation is gated. The AI Generated tab still appears in the New Theme dialog, but Integrated AI shows a Subscribe to Premium prompt instead of generating. The Bring Your Own AI path keeps working on every plan.
Publishing is gated. Publishing themes and icon sets is part of Community Publishing, which Premium covers. New publishes wait until Premium is restored. Themes and icon sets you already published stay in the Community library; nothing is pulled out from under the people who installed them.
Picking community work keeps working. You can install community themes and icon sets without limit, on every plan, before and after Premium.
Icon Generation Credit packs you bought stay yours, with their original 90-day expiration. The 100-credit signup bonus is revoked when Premium ends; purchased packs are not.

See Subscription for the full list of what changes when Premium ends, and Your Account for where to actually open the cancel flow.

Quick reference

If you want to…	Do this
Change a budget’s colors	Open Edit Budget, tap Theme, pick from My Themes or Community
Change a budget’s icons	Open Edit Budget, tap Icon Set, pick from My Icons or Community
Make a custom theme by hand	Themes page, New Theme, Manual mode
Generate a theme from a description	Themes page, New Theme, AI Generated mode (Integrated AI is Premium)
Use BYOAI to generate a theme without Premium	New Theme, AI Generated, switch to Bring Your Own AI
Find a community theme	Themes page, Community tab, Filter to sort or search
Save a community theme to your library for editing	Select on Community, Download Theme, then Restore Theme on My Themes
Publish your own theme or icon set	Open it on My Themes / My Icons, tap Publish Theme or Publish Icon Set (Premium)
Lock a theme without publishing	Revoke Theme in the toolbar
Back up a theme	Select it on My Themes, tap Download Theme
Restore a theme from a backup	My Themes, Restore Theme in the toolbar (20 KB file limit)
Get an icon set’s SVGs out of the app	Select it, tap Download Icon Set (ZIP with manifest plus SVGs)
Delete a theme that’s in use	Select on My Themes, Delete Theme, confirm in the Theme In Use dialog (back up first if you might want it later)

Behind the scenes

A few notes on what the app does behind the user-facing flow, for the curious.

What the AI sees when you generate a theme. The Integrated AI service receives only your style preset choice and your description text. It does not receive any data about your budget, your accounts, your categories, your transactions, or your bank. It returns a JSON object with the UI colors and palette, which the app validates before saving. See Subscription for the cross-cutting privacy summary.

Why the palette has 8 to 12 colors. Below 8, neighboring rings on the sunburst chart start sharing colors and become hard to tell apart. Above 12, the palette becomes muddy because chart series repeat.

What is in a theme backup file. Every UI color (light and dark), the palette, the name, the description, and a flag indicating whether the theme was AI-generated. No history, no usage data, no budget reference; the file is portable across accounts and devices.

What is in an icon set ZIP. A manifest.json describing the set, one SVG file per icon, and (for community downloads) a CC0 license header.

Subscription: Premium covers AI Theme Generation and Community Publishing. The Subscription page explains how Premium Subscriber Credits and Icon Generation Credits work, and what changes when Premium ends.
Your Account: full-budget Backup and Restore, Cancel Premium, and the profile page where you set the username needed for publishing.
Discover: a featured page that surfaces the most-liked community themes, icon sets, and individual icons across four rolling time periods.
Public Budgets: your published themes and icon sets show up on the same profile page as your public budgets.
Sharing a Budget: collaborators see whichever theme and icon set the budget has applied.
Accessibility: high-contrast and font-scaling settings interact with whichever theme is applied to a budget.