Best Cosplay Budget Trackers (2026)

Most budget apps can't tell you what one costume cost

I've built 47 costumes over eight years. For the first twenty of them my budget system was a shoebox of receipts and a bad feeling. The number I could never produce was the one everybody asks for at a con: what did that armor set actually cost?

Generic finance apps don't answer that. They'll tell you that you spent $412 at Joann this year. They can't split a $9 sheet of 10mm EVA between the pauldrons for one build and the bracers for another, and they have no idea that the wig in your closet was bought on clearance for a costume you haven't started yet.

Per-project allocation is the entire job. That's what I graded these six tools on.

Housekeeping first: Cosgear shows up on almost every older roundup as "the free one." It's dead. The store listings are gone and app.cosgear.co returned an HTTP 402 when I checked in August 2026.

If you want the wider planning picture rather than just money, I compared the full feature sets in our cosplay planning app roundup. This post is only about tracking spend.

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Quick verdict

• Want the strongest per-item budget rollup on a phone? Cosplai, if you can live with 5 free projects.
• Want free with no upsell ever? Cosplan. No premium tier at all.
• Think in build steps rather than shopping lists? Cosflowy.
• Want total control and zero cost? Google Sheets with the Raisin Cosplay template.
• Already live in Notion? The free Cosplay Expenses Tracker template.
• Want the budget to build itself from your materials list? Costumary (that's us, and I'll be honest about the gaps).
• Just want a number before you commit? The free build cost estimator needs no account.

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1. Cosplai

Platforms: iOS, Android (no web app) Price: Free (5 active projects, 25 completed cosplays, 25 images per project, 3 active events) / Pro $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year Best for: Phone-first cosplayers who log purchases at the store

Cosplai is the most budget-serious of the dedicated mobile apps. Every item you add carries a price and a status (to buy, to make, ordered, finished), and those roll up into a project total automatically. That's the exact workflow Cosplanner got right before it died, and Cosplai rebuilt it properly.

What it does well:

The rollup is genuinely good. You're not typing a total anywhere, you're just pricing items, and the project number updates itself. Version 1.1.5 added 39 currency options including Indian Rupee and Polish Zloty, which matters more than it sounds if you're ordering foam from a European supplier.

Where it falls short:

The free tier got tighter. The pricing page on cosplai.me now lists 5 active projects and 25 images per project. The App Store description still says "up to 10 active projects," so trust the website, not the listing. I hit the 25-image cap on a single Valkyrie chest plate because I photograph every test fit.

Mobile only, which I feel most when I'm reconciling receipts at a desk. And $59.99 a year is the highest price in this category by a wide margin.

I logged a $17 Barge contact cement purchase in Cosplai while standing in the hardware store aisle, and that habit changed my totals more than any feature did. Spreadsheet friction on a phone is what kills tracking.

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2. Cosplan

Platforms: iOS, Android (no web app) Price: Free. The FAQ states plainly that "there is no premium tier and no paid features" Best for: Cosplayers who want expense logging bundled with a community

Cosplan is the only tool here that is completely free with no upgrade path, confirmed on their own FAQ page in August 2026. It covers purchases and budget, closet and inventory, time logged, photo and video references, and convention reminders.

What it does well:

Cross-platform including web, which almost nobody in this category offers. The inventory feature is the sleeper: it tracks what you already own, which is the single biggest source of wasted cosplay money. I have bought the same shade of gray acrylic four separate times.

Where it falls short:

The budget side is a purchase log, not a budget. You get what you spent. You don't get estimated versus actual per component, which is where builds actually go wrong. My chest plates always come in near estimate. My finishing supplies always run 60% over, and only an estimate column surfaces that.

Free with no revenue model also means you're trusting a project with no paying users to keep the lights on. I found no published in-app purchase pricing to verify, so take the FAQ at its word and keep an export of your data.

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3. Cosflowy

Platforms: Web, installable as a PWA on mobile Price: Free tier with a premium tier. The premium price is not published anywhere on the site Best for: Builders who organize by costume element rather than by shopping list

Cosflowy breaks a costume into elements, and each element carries its own materials, expenses, tasks, and progress. Instead of one flat spend list per costume, you get spend per piece.

What it does well:

Element-level expenses are the right granularity for armor. When I know the greaves alone ate $48 in primer and clear coat, I can plan the next pair properly. Most tools stop at the costume level and lose that.

Where it falls short:

Not publishing the premium price is a real problem when you're choosing a tool. I checked the site in August 2026 and there's no number, so you can't budget for your budgeting app.

Budgeting is also explicitly secondary to workflow management here. If money is your primary concern rather than process, the emphasis is in the wrong place. Desktop-optimized, so the phone experience is a compromise.

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4. Google Sheets

Platforms: Anything with a browser Price: Free. Paid cosplay templates exist on Etsy Best for: People who want exactly their own columns and will maintain them

A spreadsheet is still the most flexible option, and for plenty of builders it's the correct one. The structure that works: item, category, which build, estimated cost, actual cost, quantity, status, and vendor. The "which build" column is what separates a tracker from a shopping list.

What it does well:

Raisin Cosplay publishes a free cosplay tracker template with progress bars, budget tracking, time logs, priority dropdowns, and a convention packing list. It's view-only, so you go to File then Make a copy. That template plus the component breakdown method from our cosplay budgeting guide covers most of what a paid app does.

Where it falls short:

You maintain it. Nothing reminds you, nothing rolls up unless you write the formula, and editing a wide sheet on a phone in a fabric store is genuinely unpleasant.

On paid templates: Etsy blocks automated fetching, so I could not load the listing pages to verify current prices. I'm not going to invent a number. Open the listings yourself and check before you buy.

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5. Notion (Cosplay Expenses Tracker by RME)

Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, desktop apps Price: Free template, free Notion personal plan Best for: People already running their life in Notion

There's a Cosplay Expenses Tracker template by RME on the Notion Marketplace, free as of August 2026. It tracks expenses per project and shows both what you've spent and what you still owe, which helps when you're splitting a group cosplay order.

What it does well:

The database model does per-project filtering and category rollups without you writing formulas. If you already have a Notion workspace, this is fifteen minutes of setup.

Where it falls short:

The marketplace listing metadata is a mess (it currently claims it was last updated 56 years ago), so you can't tell how actively it's maintained.

More practically, Notion is slow on mobile with image-heavy content, and it knows nothing about cosplay. It won't tell you that 4 sheets of 10mm foam is a normal quantity for a chest plate or that you forgot strapping hardware again. Every bit of domain knowledge is on you.

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6. Costumary

Platforms: Web (responsive on mobile, no native app) Price: Free tier includes 2 active projects with materials, budget, and stash tracking. Base is $9 per month, Studio is $19 per month Best for: Builders who'd rather maintain a materials list than a budget

Full disclosure: this is us. The design decision here is that you never enter a budget. You enter materials, and the budget is calculated from them.

What it does well:

Every material carries a per-item status (need, ordered, arrived, owned, tested, used) and a cost. The budget panel is a view of that list, so your shopping list and your budget can't drift apart. That's the failure mode I hit with every spreadsheet I ever built.

The cross-project stash tracks materials you already own across all builds, which is the fix for buying the same gray paint four times. I wrote about that specific habit in checking your materials before you shop.

The build cost estimator and the convention budget planner both work with no account at all, so you can get a realistic number before deciding whether any of this is worth signing up for. If you want the cosplay-specific view of the workspace, that's at our cosplay page.

Where it falls short:

No native iOS or Android app. If your tracking habit depends on tapping an icon in a checkout line, Cosplai or Cosplan will serve you better today.

Two active projects on the free tier is genuinely tight if you're juggling three cons. And we have no estimated-versus-actual column yet, which a good spreadsheet still beats us on.

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How they compare

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What about YNAB or another general budgeting app?

A real finance app is the right tool for a different question. YNAB costs $14.99 per month or $109 per year with a 34-day trial, and it's excellent at telling you that your hobby consumed $1,840 this year against a $1,200 plan. That's worth knowing.

It's the wrong tool for a build. YNAB categorizes by merchant and account, not by costume, so a single $86 order that covers two projects lands in one bucket. You'd be manually tagging transactions with build names, and at that point a spreadsheet does the job for free. Run a finance app for the year-level view and a per-project tracker for the builds. They answer different questions.

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Why the estimate column is the one that matters

A full EVA foam armor set runs $180 to $350 in materials, and the line-by-line breakdown in our EVA foam armor cost post shows foam is the cheapest part of it. Primer, paint, and adhesive eat more of the budget than anyone expects. Two bottles of Flexbond is $24 before you've cut a single piece.

Estimated versus actual is the feature I'd happily pay for and almost nobody sells. If you only track actuals, you learn you overspent after the money is gone.

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