Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app

trackm.net

21 pointsiccananea22 comments

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.

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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?

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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

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?

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...

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!

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

Must be ready to go then

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Monetizing this is going to be challenging.

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.

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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