Live at citybudget.vercel.app · Shipped product · End-to-end design
Overview
New York City spends over $100 billion a year, and the data is fully public. But to use it, a resident has to navigate Checkbook NYC, the Comptroller's official tool: a powerful, comprehensive system organized around fiscal years, agency codes, and vendor taxonomies. It was built for procurement analysts and fiscal oversight professionals, not the public it serves.
City Budget redesigns that presentation layer for residents. It organizes spending by service, not by agency, translates fiscal jargon into plain language, and leads with visualization so the shape of the budget is legible at a glance. It is the second product in the City Explorer civic platform, alongside City Permits.
Spending organized by service, legible on the device where people actually ask the question.
The challenge
I ran the incumbent firsthand: "How much did the city spend on paving in Queens in 2025?" After 30 minutes, I could not answer it. The data was there. The pathway from a resident's question to a resident's answer was not. Filters used fiscal years, not calendar years. Vocabulary assumed you knew which of 100-plus agencies handles paving. Numbers appeared with no explanation.
The barrier was never interest or data availability. It was legibility. The data is public; the experience is private.
The solution
City Budget is organized around what the city does, not which department does it. The primary navigation is service categories (Education, Public Safety, Transportation, Sanitation) rather than agency codes, the single most important structural decision in the product.
Navigate by what the city does, not which department does it.
Visualization is the default, not a supplement. Every spending view leads with a proportional breakdown, with the data table available underneath for anyone who wants it. A "Where it goes / Where it comes from" toggle makes both sides of the budget legible, the income side that almost no civic tool presents well. Year-over-year change indicators sit on every figure, turning a static number into a trend. Plain-language tooltips explain every term inline, so the interface teaches as you use it.
The same data composes into the revenue view for anyone tracking where the money comes from, not just where it goes.
It is mobile-first as a civic-access principle, not a layout checkbox. People meet budget questions in the flow of daily life: a headline on the subway, a claim at a community board meeting. The moment of curiosity is mobile, so the design meets it there, with the same data composing into a desktop view for reporters who need depth.
City Budget and City Permits share a design system and a platform switcher. Two civic products, one coherent family.
Reflection
City Budget is the newest product in a body of independent civic work, and the through-line is deliberate: public data that shapes how people live should be legible to the people it describes. City Permits proved that thesis on construction. City Budget extends it to the city's money, with a different interface form and the same design system underneath.