Do not pay for a budget app. Not at first, anyway. For most international students the honest answer is no, and the app companies really do not want you to know that. Here is the breakdown.
What free tiers give you: expense logging, category budgets, basic charts, usually multi-currency support. That covers ninety percent of student needs. A study abroad budget planner app free tier will happily track your rent, groceries, transport, and going-out money. The limits show up as caps on accounts or manual entry only. Manual entry sounds annoying. It is actually the feature, because typing in every purchase makes you feel it. Automation makes spending invisible. Invisible spending is the problem.
What paid tiers add: automatic bank syncing, receipt scanning, fancy forecasting, priority support. Bank syncing is the big one. It is convenient, and it is also where things get messy abroad. Syncing a home-country account and a new local account in different currencies breaks more often than the marketing suggests. Some students pay for a year of premium and use it exactly like the free tier. I have watched this happen. It hurts to watch.
The middle path: start free. Use it for two months. If you hit a real limit, like you genuinely need receipt scanning for reimbursement paperwork, then consider paying. Do not pay on day one for problems you do not have yet. That is just donating to a SaaS company.
Whatever you choose, pair it with a city by city student expense tracker app habit: log daily, review weekly. A study abroad cost of living calculator app, iOS or Android, supplies the starting assumptions for your specific city. Ground it in a real monthly budget for international students breakdown for your actual city, not a template. An app with wrong assumptions is worse than no app, because it gives you false confidence. False confidence spends money.
The tool matters less than the habit. Pick the free one you will actually open. And if you want the budget numbers built around your city first, the pre-departure concierge at studyabroadadvisor.fyi does that with students. Habits beat subscriptions.