Tell HN: How you changed my life trajectory

I didn't know what product this was. I didn't read the article. I don't know your username.

But somehow, in my heart of hearts, I knew it was the financial planning sandbox that I create a free account on everytime it is posted here.

I'm still not at a point in life to NEED it just yet. But yknow what ? Give me 5 years, a mortgage, a couple of kids to juggle and I'll likely come groveling to this tool as my savior.

It is rare for a tool i dont use to stay with me for as long as this one has. Good job. I strongly recommend it as a 'non-user'...hehe.

This gave me a good laugh.

With your powers of intuition, maybe you should just put it all on black a few times then call it a day (jk, please don't)

Anyway, I appreciate you checking it out, and I'll do my best to still be here in 5 years when you come back ;)

Somehow, this is the one product I have seen on HN that I always think : "Huh, I hope this works out, and HN is exactly the place where people would appreciate it."

So, I guess I was mentally primed for thinking of your tool when I read the title. No premonition, just monkey brain pattern matching.

Although you might not need it right now, take it from someone who does:

Financial planning is an extremely useful habit.

It is an enormous freedom to know what I spend my money on, what I can cut back, and how much I can spend per day after all my bills are paid.

Agreed. I have a slightly different model for financial planning. I plan around macros instead of micros. I'm a scatter brained person, so Type-A systems don't work as well for me.

I don't have a family, so there are only a few numbers I need to remember. Those are the numbers I plan around. Costs = rent + car + food + subscriptions.

So I live with roommates, take public transportation, try to cook at home, generally avoid alcohol and stick to ($$) 2 dollar sign level restaurants. I don't really track anything, but make sure that I live within the sandbox I have defined for myself.

Similarly, I have kept my investing strategy simple. Max out 401k + HSA immediately (ESPP if avilable) & never withdraw your stock vest (I do rebalance). That way I guarantee pretty hefty lower bound on my annual savings.

Soon, I will be unable to count my major investments & spends on my fingers. At that point, I will absolutely be taking your advice.

> after building on nights and weekends for the past 2.5 years and reaching 2,500 paid customers

Huge accomplishment! Hats off to you for pursuing what makes you feel fulfilled.

Thanks! There are times where burning the candle at both ends for that long started to wear me down. But I really love the project, and after growing a community around it, I knew I had to push through.

I also put an exercise bike next to my desk, and that's helped to keep the blood pressure under control.

Hey, me too.

I've started reading HN around 2012, when I was more of a game designer than developer. Throughout the years, I've changed into developer stack, grew professionally, changed game dev for fullstack web development, grew to love functional programming and embraced a lot of things doing "the HN" way. I even switched from regional companies to working for american companies remotely — thanks to "Who's hiring threads"! And when I'm talking to my american colleagues now, we share a lot of the same culture — SICP, "considered harmful", "just a monoid of endofunctors", all of which I learned here. Now I'm working on my O1 visa application, and once again, I wouldn't be here if not for HN.

And for the point of comparison, there's been this other social app, which I won't name, that requires a tech company email to access. For a long time, while I didn't work for a recognised american company, I thought of it as an exclusive closed club and assumed that there should be much better content there. But once I finally got access to it, it turned out to be a complete anon cesspool of bragging about TC, cheating on interviews and other things from people who came to tech just for the money, without any glimpse of love for the craft.

After using that other app for a couple of weeks, I've deleted it never to log on again and now even more surprised to see how great a community HN turned out to be.

Blind is a toxic cesspool of greed and frankly, ignorance, that is surprising for the supposed selection effects.

However, there are still certain aspects of it where the insider info on companies is better than HN. You can find out certain crappy aspects that happen or how high of compensation a role is, that many people on HN will flat out deny or only collectively acknowledge years later.

This is why I never created a blind account. I do not care about how much others are paid. I get what I ask for. But anyhow, I think people who got into the industry just for the money might actually be sleeping well. Everything from not enough code coverage to stupid deployment practices bothers me. And I am more emotionally invested in doing the right thing. Politics and stupid tactics drain me.

I had a very similar experience with a toxic app like that :) I must say that I found a handful of valuable threads/comments that helped me, so perhaps it's not all bad.

Excellent! Love to see these sorts of posts since this is also a goal of mine. (Though I'm in the situation of having quit first due to other reasons, I'd very much like to build a sustainable product vs returning to a W2 job.)

One specific question, and pardon my ignorance, having not dug into the product: are you beholden to a financial data provider (Plaid, etc.), or is all data self-entered? I've read a few times that upstream data providers (financial, weather, etc.) can really put a damper on indie products.

Good luck, I'll be rooting for you!

Currently balance updates are manual. The idea of account linking is actually a bit of a contentious topic in the PL community. Initially I wanted to steer clear of that notorious support/maintenance/cost tar pit and design a tool where the focus is more on long-term projection rather than fixating on the latest daily stock price fluctuations and possibly missing the forest for the trees.

Later this year I do plan to take another look at those services though.

There was a fairly recent, well-upvoted blog post shared here about a guy who worked for a few years polishing his iOS stocks app and ultimately gave up due to the data feeds becoming untenable. Excellent article... that I can't find :-(

Sounds interesting link pls!

Finally found it (kept searching for "released" when it was actually "launched").

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903489

Awesome, I ended up purchasing your app, which is saying a lot because I hardly ever do stuff like that. It's been helpful in weighing out different financial decisions recently.

Thanks so much, I'm glad to hear it! That means you're one of the people who has helped to make this step possible :)

This is really exciting to hear! I've been paying for it for a few years now, and it's awesome to know that my little contribution has helped towards this!

I've been using the app to plan the end of my own full time employment, and seeing this makes me more determined than ever to see that through!

Oh it absolutely helped.

Thanks for being one of the OG early adopters who kept me energized and motivated over the past couple years!

And best of luck with the final boss: One More Year Syndrome.

Having a sense of community is powerful.

It's why for many people: sports, colleagues, cults, religions, clubs and even gags can be so meaningful and important to people.

HN brings me personal joy every day.

The discourse, seeking for knowledge together, and general sense of support is what brings me back day-after-day.

I love Projection Lab, it's the perfect product that allows me to track many streams of income, expenses, investments, and tax over time.

With little effort, I was able to model my personal finance trajectory and build very a useful overview of my life in terms of financials.

Within the first 5 minutes of using it, I immediately paid for a premium account.

Thanks for your efforts!

> But to my astonishment, the constructive and energizing feedback I received

Are you sure that was us?

Well, perhaps I had to squint to see it much less than expected.

Heh yeah we must have been off our game that day.

Congrats!

I have HN to thank for exposing me to a ton of new tech/trends, but I think more importantly exposing me to smart, passionate people coming from very different perspectives, who I'd have never met otherwise. It's so valuable to know what's really out there and what's possible with a little time outside the comfort zone.

The shared homepage experience on HN is one of the most underrated aspects IMO.

With other platforms, the algorithmically curated and individualized feeds just feel like these claustrophobic little echo chambers to me.

There's a ton of interesting stuff out there on the internet, but it's hard to actually encounter it when you have to fight against the feed algorithms to get exposure to new concepts and ideas.

I hadn’t thought of this, but yes, it very much makes me feel connected to everyone who reads regularly (and interestingly I feel differently about the posts and people who read HN on the weekends too). It’s probably as important as the strict adherence to the rules of the forum that keeps it fresh and generally positive.

I feel very fortunate that this place hasn’t succumbed to the noise and negativity that most places I’ve haunted on the internet have in the previous decades.

I really like the politeness rules that Dang enforces. I think it's a wonderful place that fosters respectful discussions and makes many people not afraid to somewhat link their real life identities to their HN profiles. I recently saw an old coworker's username on an unexpected comment and smiled to know they're still on this Earth.

Congrats on your project!

I am also pursuing a dream of mine: standup comedy.

I believe strongly in the same thing: it's better to work on something you're passionate about and possibly fail than just continue doing non-engaging work for a monthly salary.

Even in the worst case, at least it's good for the plot ;P

What is it like trying to come up in that industry?

This is inspiring on its own! With my side projects I often find I get a rough prototype to the point where I can dogfood it in a few weeks, but then the problem is that it works well enough for me that I don't feel a strong need to improve it much further but it is still ugly enough with rough corners that it does not attract other users. How do you get past that?

Congrats!

I used to use Firefly III, this looks similar but more polished.

Am I correct, self-hosting is only possible with the $520 lifetime license?

Hey thanks! And yeah that's currently the case.

Most of the folks who initially asked for a self-hosted version wanted a way to pay once and then know their deployment could operate offline indefinitely. I hoped there might be a bit less piracy risk that way too.

If others would be more interested in a recurring model for self-hosting though, I'd definitely consider it.

I would be very interested, depending on cost.

For pricing models, JetBrains (PyCharm) has a nice setup, although it could be more user friendly. After 12 months of payments you get a perpetual fallback license[0].

The more user friendly version would be getting perpetual access to the current version of software after 12 months of payments, rather than the backdated version. But I understand their reasoning.

0 - https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Be warned, most of the comments I’ve heard on HN are that self hosting options are disproportionately expensive to support. Charge accordingly

Luckily the current self-hosted version has not been much of a burden to support so far.

But I do wonder if/how that might change with an alternate licensing model.

In the examples you've heard about, do you recall where the most significant support costs oftened stem from?

I think it was dealing with the myriad different environments they could be deployed in. I’ve done a lot of sysadmin work, and I can tell you that a lot of companies just don’t have a repeatable environment. That said, my suspicion is these days, with a good container type solution, if you maintain that, and support just what’s inside that boundary, that can go a long way to mitigate calls. Of course, I love containers until they break, especially when they break because of some implied dependency changes.

Ah, makes sense. This one is containerized and orchestrated with Docker Compose.

At this point, I can barely imagine trying to create and maintain a cross-platform self-hostable product the old school way.

It’s so funny, because I’m engineering from electron to container to saas. You’re going the other direction. I’m the label printer app dev that reached out a few days ago. Great job, Kyle!

Oh wow, fancy seeing you here! :D

This is backwards to what I am used to; self-hosting is normally the free option and hosted is paid, this is common among many projects.

We also certainly hear about companies or individuals looking for an easy way to send money for FOSS projects they rely on, so hopefully it works out for you!

Very cool! Congrats on the success. :-)

I wonder how many other people have had similar experiences thanks to using HN?

A HN success story. This post makes my day.

Aww thanks! Although, I'm hesitant to call it a success story yet. Pretty sure that would triple the odds something spontaneously combusts.

Great product, good luck!

I have the same dream, but haven't taken the leap.

Thanks! What part of the journey are you in at this stage?

Congrats! I envy you.

Massive achievement, congratulations!

Congrats! And that’s a really neat product!

Thanks! Really looking forward to being able to bring a new level of sustained focus to it, without all the context switching of the past couple years.

Congratulations!

Best of luck, and I hope you become a millionaire or billionaire.

If I can work on passion projects like this sustainably and live a modest lifestyle, that's all I've ever really wanted :)

Indeed