Budget & Spending Transparency

"Where did my tax money go?" is one of the oldest civic-tech questions. The answer involves CKAN-shaped data portals, Open Knowledge Foundation's OpenSpending, and a thin layer of country-specific transparency portals. Pair with Civic Tech Overview, Open Data (CKAN), Investigative Journalism, and Analytics.

Free / FOSS (start here)

• ★ ★ OpenSpending — MIT; the canonical FOSS budget-data platform. Built by Open Knowledge Foundation. Imports any budget as a "fiscal data package" (CSV + descriptor); produces interactive treemaps + sankey diagrams + a data API. Used by ~70 governments and dozens of civil-society projects. Less actively developed in 2024–26 than its peak years but still widely deployed.
• ★ ★ Fiscal Data Package — Frictionless Data spec; how OpenSpending describes a budget machine-readably. The right format to publish a budget in if you want it reused.
• ★ CKAN + DataStore — see Open Data; the typical underlying portal.
• ★ Where Does My Money Go? — UK; non-profit; archived but historically important; the original treemap-of-public-spending; OpenSpending grew out of it.
• OpenBudgets.eu — EU H2020-funded research project; FOSS budget-comparison tooling; mostly archived but the concepts live in OpenSpending.

US

• ★ USAspending.gov — free; US Treasury's official federal-spending portal; covers contracts, grants, loans, and direct payments. DATA Act of 2014 mandated this. Bulk download + API. Genuinely usable.
• ★ OpenPaymentsData (CMS) — free; healthcare-industry-payments-to-physicians; transparency disclosures.
• ★ Federal Audit Clearinghouse — free; single-audit reports for federal grant recipients.
• OpenGov — paid; the dominant US municipal-finance SaaS (different from "open government" generally); used widely by US cities for budget transparency portals. Closed source.
• ClearGov / ResourceX / Tyler Munis — paid; municipal-finance vendors.
• Citizen-Budget tools ("balance the budget" simulators) — open-sourced by various civic-hacker groups; quality varies; OpenStates Budget has lightweight tooling.

UK / EU

• ★ HM Treasury OSCAR — UK; free; structured-spending data feed; CKAN-published.
• ★ EU Financial Transparency System — free; eu cohesion-funds + EU-budget data; downloadable.
• TheyBuyForYou / Spend Network — UK procurement-data; partial FOSS.
• Public Money / Public Code (FSFE) — advocacy; not a tool but the policy push for "publicly funded code = public code."

Latin America / global

• ★ Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) — Open Contracting Partnership; the canonical schema for procurement / contracts. Adopted by Mexico, Colombia, Ukraine, UK, and dozens more. JSON/CSV; well-documented.
• OpenContracting Partnership — non-profit; tools + advocacy around OCDS.
• MapaInversiones (Latin America) — IADB-backed; visualizes investment / project spending across LATAM countries.
• ProZorro (Ukraine) — FOSS; the most successful e-procurement system in any developing country; OCDS-native; widely cited as a procurement-transparency model.

Procurement / contracts

• ★ ★ Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) — see above; pure spec.
• ★ OCDS Kit / OCDS Data Review Tool — Python; FOSS tools from OCP for working with OCDS data.
• SAM.gov — US federal procurement portal; free; spec-compliant for federal contracts.
• TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) — EU procurement; free; bulk-downloadable.

Aid / international development

• ★ IATI Standard (International Aid Transparency Initiative) — XML schema for aid flows; mandatory for many DFID / EU / USAID projects.
• ★ d-portal.org — IATI data portal; free.
• AidData — William & Mary; geocoded aid data; free for research.

Honest take (2026)

• OpenSpending lost momentum post-2018; OKFN's funding shifted; the codebase still works but feels stale. Worth using; don't expect rapid features.
• OCDS is the success story. Procurement-transparency is genuinely better than budget-transparency in 2026 because OCDS gave it a shared schema; budget data is still a thousand idiosyncratic CSVs.
• USAspending.gov is genuinely good for federal data; state and municipal data is wildly uneven.
• The hard problem isn't visualization, it's reconciliation — matching budget lines across years, vendors across spelling variants, programs across reorganizations. AI-assisted entity resolution is starting to help. See Investigative Tools for Aleph.
• "Citizen Budget" simulators are nice teaching tools but rarely change actual budget outcomes.

Pick this if…

• You're publishing a city / national budget: Fiscal Data Package + CKAN; mirror to OpenSpending.
• Federal US spending analysis: USAspending.gov bulk download; load into Datasette.
• Procurement data: OCDS-native portal; the standard exists.
• You're investigating a procurement scandal: Aleph + OCDS data dumps. See Investigative Tools.
• Aid data: IATI via d-portal.
• You're a city IT shop: demand OCDS-compliant exports from your procurement vendor — it's a one-line policy with huge downstream payoff.