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Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app

trackm.net

21 points by iccananea 2 months ago · 24 comments · 1 min read

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I built this as a personal finance app that allows me to see how my recurring incomes and expenses will affect my network over the years.

So trackm can show up to 4 years in the future and track when your accounts will go negative given you expenses and incomes.

I've been dogfooding it for the past 10 days, fixing issues I find from my day-to-day use and now it's at a point where I'm comfortable sharing it with others.

The app is free for 30 days, after which it goes into read-only mode. Paying the one-time license fee unlocks it forever.

deweller 2 months ago

I use YNAB. I thought about building my own now that AI coding make this feasible. But the moat that I can't cross is the integration with my bank accounts. Plaid and the like are too expensive and don't cater to one-off users like me.

Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?

  • thenews 2 months ago

    actual budget something similar from what i can see via SimpleFIN Bridge (https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/#supported-...)

    • pcchristie 2 months ago

      Actual Budget is incredible. Happy (now free since it's gone FOSS, formerly paying) customer since migrating from YNAB4 ~ 3/4/5 (?) years ago.

  • mpbart 2 months ago

    As a few others have said Plaid is actually rather cheap if you only have a handful of accounts. I created my own personal finance tracker when Intuit Mint shut down and Plaid costs me $1.80 per month for all my linked accounts which feels very reasonable to me

  • amrawad 2 months ago

    Check out Lunch Flow, that's the exact reason I built this :) we Aggregate multiple providers behind a simple api for global coverage, and with a pricing friendly to individuals not businesses.

  • iccananeaOP 2 months ago

    I am researching providers to be able to add account sync to trackm.net

    I haven't done it at first because

    (1) they all have monthly / yearly costs and I wanted a flat fee;

    (2) I can't update the account without the user having logged in because of how the encryption works.

  • phoenixy1 2 months ago

    Plaid has a pay-as-you-go option that's only about $2/month for this use case. (I believe the current rack rate PAYG pricing is 30 cents per month per connected bank login).

  • qntmfred 2 months ago

    https://teller.io/ has been on my radar to play with

  • benmanns 2 months ago

    I thought Plaid have (had?) a developer account that could connect something like 100 accounts that was free.

  • kkfx 2 months ago

    GoCardless might be an option, at least for OpenBank (UE/SEPA), no idea for the USA though...

    • wesdie 2 months ago

      I think GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts recently, which makes it a bit harder to rely on now.

      Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?

      • kkfx 2 months ago

        So far GoCardless works for me, maybe they still kept old accounts. I've heard of https://enablebanking.com but never tried them. I know also:

        - https://www.saltedge.com

        - https://www.fabrick.com

        - https://www.bridgeapi.io

        but they do not offer a free tier AFAIK

        Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...

        Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...

        • wesdie 2 months ago

          Yeah GoCardless still works, just not for new accounts sadly.

          Feels like the options are still pretty limited unless you go paid/enterprise.

          Woob is interesting, but scraping always feels like a ticking time bomb.

          Thank you for the suggestions!

furyofantares 2 months ago

> I've been dogfooding it for the past 10 days

Must be ready to go then

mzelling 2 months ago

The privacy angle is interesting. I'm curious how people view the pricing strategy of taking a one-time payment for lifetime access. My first thought was that it encourages the developer to focus more on recruiting new users rather than keeping existing ones happy - makes me wonder what will become of the product if new user growth stalls.

  • iccananeaOP 2 months ago

    That's actually a fair point, regarding the implications of a one time fee.

    Personally, I don't like subscription-based apps so didn't want to create yet another one.

    And I built this around my personal needs so I plan to support it indefinitely.

    Regarding long term improvements, there is a number of paying users that once I achieve, any new users are basically profit.

    The service was built to be cheap to run and maintain so I could charge a one time fee.

moelf 2 months ago

any comparison with https://actualbudget.org/ ?

  • iccananeaOP 2 months ago

    Hadn't heard of it before, though looks similar in intent.

    My inspiration for trackm was actually moneywell.app which i bought a license for in 2009.

    The "look X years" into the future feature was pulled from it.

    I no longer have a mac or ios device, so built trackm to fill the void.

cadamsdotcom 2 months ago

I’m really sorry but anyone can vibe a personal finance app in 2026.

Monetizing this is going to be challenging.

  • bsticks 2 months ago

    I've wrestled with this idea. Do you think the general population will all be vibe coding finance apps? I have to think that most will still just pay the big players.

    (I say this as someone who vibe coded a finance app, and it works!)...now I'm not sure what to do with it, it works for me - do I open it to the world or just keep making it great for me.

jontycollins a month ago

Really strong effort. A lot of useful features that I'm looking for in budgeting apps. You've obviously gone for a privacy feature as its selling point but how is the encryption different to anything else? Surely every finance app has a strong encryption?

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