I've been building Stratos, a private personal finance app designed around a simple question:

How much money can I safely spend without getting in the way of the bills, plans, and other things I need my money for?

Stratos helps bring together the money you receive, the things you need to pay for, what you want to set aside, your accounts, and everyday spending.

It then gives you a Safe-to-Spend amount, an estimate of how much money is actually available to spend after considering the financial plans you've told Stratos about.

Interested? You can apply here: https://stratos.kapexlabs.app/testers

More details on what the test involves below:

The app has reached the point where I need people who weren't involved in building it to use it in real life and tell me where it makes sense, where it doesn't, and whether it actually becomes useful over time.

I'm looking for a small first group of around 10–15 people willing to use Stratos for roughly 60 days.

You do not need to use it every day.

The goal is to use it naturally enough to experience things like getting paid, paying bills, spending money, moving into a new month, and seeing how your Safe-to-Spend amount changes over time.

You do not need to know anything about budgeting

You don't need to be good with money.

You don't need to have used a budgeting app before.

You don't need to know financial terminology.

In fact, if personal finance tools usually feel confusing, intimidating, or like they're made for people who already know what they're doing, your perspective would be especially useful.

Part of what I want to learn is whether Stratos can make sense to someone starting from zero.

What I'd ask you to do

At the beginning, Stratos will walk you through some basic information about your money.

For example:

• What money usually comes in.
• What things you regularly need to pay for.
• Roughly how much you'd like to set aside for things like groceries, eating out, transportation, or other spending.
• Any accounts or debts you want Stratos to consider.

Then, over the following weeks, just use the app as part of your normal routine.

That might mean:

• Adding money when you get paid.
• Recording some purchases.
• Marking bills as paid.
• Checking how much Stratos says is safe to spend.
• Adjusting your plan when something changes.
• Coming back later to see whether the app still reflects your situation.

I'm especially interested in questions like:

• Did you understand what Stratos was asking you to do?
• Was there anywhere you didn't know what to do next?
• Did anything use words you didn't understand?
• Did Safe-to-Spend make sense?
• Did you understand why the number changed?
• Did it ever affect a real spending decision?
• Was anything more complicated than it needed to be?
• Did you naturally come back to the app after setting it up?
• After using it for a while, did Stratos help you feel like you understood your money any better?

You do not need to use real financial information

You can use rounded numbers, representative values, or completely fictional information if you'd rather not enter your real finances.

Bank connections are also optional. Stratos can be used with manually entered accounts and balances.

What kind of feedback am I looking for?

This is an alpha, not a finished public release.

I'm specifically looking for the rough edges.

You don't need to be technical, and I'm not looking for compliments.

Things like these are extremely useful:

“I don't understand what this means.”

“I expected this to work differently.”

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do here.”

“This took way too many steps.”

“I stopped using this part because it was annoying.”

“This finally made something about my money make sense.”

Stratos has a built-in Send feedback option, so you can report something whenever you run into it.

I'll also check in a few times during the 60 days to see how things are going, but this isn't meant to feel like homework. What matters most is whether you actually find yourself wanting to come back and use the tool.

Stratos is not a replacement for professional financial, tax, accounting, investment, or legal advice.

If you're interested, you can apply here:

https://stratos.kapexlabs.app/testers

I'm keeping this first group intentionally small so I can actually follow the feedback and learn from how people use the product over time.

I tried all of the major budgeting apps, and they all seems overly complicated and hard to get a good read on where my money was actually going, so I built my own app, Debrief.

Debrief helps you actually see where your money's going. Sync your accounts, or upload manually, and everything lands in one place — no more digging through multiple bank apps. Your transactions get sorted into categories automatically, using rules you set plus AI. Then you can look back over the last 3 months and actually spot the patterns so you can make better calls going forward. $4.99/month per household.

debriefmoney.com

Hello everyone,

I built Budgetisto because keeping a shared budget up to date was more work than it should be. It was too easy for one person to miss a transaction or work from outdated numbers.

Budgetisto uses envelope budgeting. You assign income to categories such as rent, groceries, entertainment, and savings. Each envelope shows what is still available, so you can see what is safe to spend.

You can share a budget with a partner, family member, or anyone else you manage money with. Transactions and balances sync across Android and the web, so everyone works from the same budget.

There’s a free plan. I’m the developer, and I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, particularly on the shared budgeting experience and anything that feels confusing.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.solonenko.budgetisto

Web: https://budgetisto.app/

Hey guys,

I’m honestly pretty bad at managing my money, and I’ve never been able to stick with budgeting apps. I download them, set everything up, look at all the charts for a few days… then completely stop opening them.

So I built Mikci

Instead of making me create a full budget, Mikci connects to my financial activity, watches my normal spending rhythm, and occasionally notices something worth working on.

It might ask me to make one small Promise, like:

“Keep eating out under $140 this week.”

Then I just live normally. I don’t have to manually track anything.

At the end of the Promise, Mikci checks what actually happened.

And apparently I’m also pretty bad at keeping my own Promises spend more than the promise

My first attempt didn’t work, so now I’m testing how Mikci handles failing, trying again, and whether seeing the history actually motivates me to do better the second time.

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a personal project I've worked on, in case anyone finds it useful or can offer me some helpful feedback. I've built Tallyo, an open-source personal finance tracker for a household: spending, budgets, net worth history, and investment portfolio in one app.

Try it without installing anything: https://orlandoc01.github.io/tallyo/ (full app on fictional data)

Repo and docs: https://github.com/orlandoc01/tallyo

I know there's a lot of these going around at the moment, so I'll try and summarize the main things about this project that I think make it useful for others.

1. Bank sync with Plaid or SimpleFIN

I primarily built this for Plaid first. Plaid's free production tier covers 10 logins, which was more than enough for me, plus if more people in your household sign up for the free tier you can use theirs too with the app. With plaid, transactions arrive pre-categorized and investment holdings come through cleanly. SimpleFIN (~$1.50/mo) works too and is fine for spending and budgets, but its holdings data is much thinner, so portfolio and net worth tracking is less reliable that way. Transactions from SimpleFIN arrive uncategorized, so there's an optional local Ollama categorizer for them. CSV import/export and manual accounts (including real estate and manual holdings/liabilities) fill in the rest.

2. MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants

Tallyo exposes an MCP endpoint (off by default) so you can ask an AI assistant about your spending, run categorization, or query net worth with it. It uses the same authorization as the server: either OAuth with an explicit consent screen (you can assign it a custom user and a role with limited permissions) or a simple API key.

3. Everything stays on your server

It runs as one binary, no additional external services required. You can use a docker image on ghcr.io or bare binaries for Linux/macOS/Windows. It supports built-in OAuth 2.1 + PKCE with Google sign-in, email OTP/magic links, and passkeys. If you want something simpler, you can also just use a simple master password authentication. It also supports optional at-rest database encryption and household role provisioning so a partner can have full, read-only, or budget-only access. Docs should have enough detail about all of this and more.

4. Mobile support via PWA

I also built it to have a good mobile experience by adding full PWA support. You can get a feel for the mobile experience too on the live demo link. It comes with a customizable nav bar and it's installable on iOS and Android

What it costs: the software is free. Your only recurring cost is bank aggregation: $0 on Plaid's free tier (less than 10 logins per Plaid credential) or ~$1.50/month with SimpleFIN.

Caveats: US and USD only for now, with no multi-currency.

Full Disclosure: This is coded with Claude and some other coding agents. I work full time as a software engineer so did my best to ensure quality remains high but figured I'd let people know as I think its always something to be wary of.

Happy to answer questions! Constructive feedback on the UI and features are also always helpful and welcome. I'll be in the comments :)

I’ve tried a lot of personal finance apps over the years, and I always ended up finding something that didn’t quite fit the way I wanted to manage my money.

Some were great at budgeting but weak on analytics. Others handled transactions well but didn’t give me the kind of overview I wanted. Eventually I decided to build my own.

It’s called Prosperae.

The main idea is to keep everyday money tracking relatively simple, but give you much more depth when you actually want to understand your finances.

It has the usual things like accounts, transactions, budgets, bills, credit cards and multi-currency support, but I put a lot of effort into the visual side: Sankey diagrams for money flow, spending heatmaps, treemaps, sunbursts, net-worth views, and other ways of looking at the same financial data.

For entering transactions, you can do it manually, scan a receipt, or use voice input.

I also chose not to require bank connections. Your financial records are kept on the device, so you can use it without giving the app access to your bank accounts.

It’s available on iOS and Android, with a free tier and an optional Premium subscription.

I’m still actively working on it, so I’d genuinely be interested in feedback from people here who have tried a lot of personal finance tools.

What’s something you wish your current finance app did better?

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prosperae/id6792417078
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prosperae.mobile

I built Duefolio because I wanted a clearer way to see recurring payments without linking my bank account or handing my financial data to another service.

Most subscription trackers show a list. Duefolio uses a visual timeline instead, so you can see what renews, what ends, and how your recurring commitments build up over time.

There’s no account and no bank connection. Your ledger stays on-device. You can also import a CSV statement to review possible recurring charges, track price history, set renewal reminders, export your data, and ask an optional on-device assistant questions about your own ledger.

The trade-off is intentional: if you want automatic bank synchronisation, Duefolio probably isn’t the right tool. It is designed for people who prefer more control and are willing to review or import their data themselves.

The core tracker is free. Pro is a $14.99 one-time purchase for statement review, custom subscriptions, income and profit-and-loss views, widgets, and additional tools. There is no monthly or annual subscription and no ads.

I’m the developer, so I’m obviously biased. I’d genuinely like to know: do you prefer a privacy-first manual workflow for recurring spending, or is automatic bank syncing essential for a tool like this?

That was really the whole idea behind TESORIN.

I didn’t want one app for budgeting, another for investments, a spreadsheet for net worth, and something else for goals or planning. I wanted one place where I could see the bigger picture.
So TESORIN brings spending, budgets, accounts, debt, net worth, investments, goals and longer-term planning together.

The other two things I cared about from the beginning were privacy and price.

There’s no bank login. Your core financial data is encrypted on your device. On Android, there’s optional bank-SMS parsing if you want a bit of automation without actually connecting your bank.

And I’ve probably spent more time than I should admit on the UI. If you’re going to look at your finances regularly, the app shouldn’t feel like accounting software.

It’s also deliberately cheap: 30 days free with no card, then $1.99 CAD/month or $14.99 CAD/year in Canada, ₹29/month or ₹199/year in India, and $1.99/$14.99 USD in supported USD markets.

There is a tradeoff: if automatic bank syncing is something you absolutely need, TESORIN probably isn’t for you. That’s intentional.

I’m the developer, so obviously I’m biased. But if you try it, I’d genuinely rather hear what feels confusing, unnecessary or annoying than get a generic “nice app.”

Website: https://www.trytesorin.com
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trytesorin.tesorin
iPhone/iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tesorin-personal-finance/id6790928779

So I've been slowly turning my finance spreadsheet into something that does everything for me, and I think I might have gone overboard, but it's decent i guess..

Basic idea: I dump my bank statements into a tab, and pretty much everything after that happens on its own.

• Cleans up and merges all the raw data automatically
• I sort new transactions into categories myself, only takes a couple minutes a month
• Feeds into a data model that drives all the charts
• Behind that there's a full model tracking my income, spending, savings, and investments month by month

The dashboard itself just shows me the important stuff, income, spending, savings rate, net worth, plus a couple charts. But the bit I actually like most is that it writes little summaries on its own, like "car was your biggest expense this month, up 18% from last month," so it is easier to make sense of it all.

It also checks its own numbers and flags anything that doesn't add up, which sounds minor but has saved me a couple times when something got miscategorized and threw a number way off.

Screenshots below, happy to answer questions if anyone's curious how any of it works.

Most budgeting apps are good at explaining where your money already went. I wanted something that answered a different question:

“What will my balance be after all the bills and paychecks coming up?”

So I built CashFlowCast.

You enter your current balance, recurring income, bills and due dates. It then creates a running forecast showing how each transaction will affect your balance over the next several months.

Some of the main features:

• Day-by-day projected balance

• Overdue, today and tomorrow totals

• Multiple checking and savings accounts

• Transfers between accounts

• Monthly spending reports and PDF export

• Optional investment portfolio tracking

• Bill history and calendar views

• Receipt scanning and email reminders with Pro

• Works on phones and computers as an installable web app

You don’t have to connect your bank account or provide banking credentials. The main app is usable for free, and the optional Pro plan is $14.95 per year.

I’m an independent developer and have been improving it based on real user feedback. I’d especially like feedback on whether the forecast makes upcoming cash-flow problems easier to spot than a traditional monthly budget.

CashFlowCast: https://cashflowcast.com

I have spent this year creating my own personal finance web app and recently launched it publicly. I spent the last 10 years tracking my finances in Excel to record everything just how I wanted, but I got tired of how long it took to keep updated. So, I built this app to solve all of my own needs in a finance tracker, and I am curious what others might think of it.

I have added screenshots to show off some of the features and to give the feel of the user interface. Here is my own experience as a dedicated budgeter having used this for several months now, and why I won't be going back to Excel:

Pros:

• Importing transactions through CSV is very fast, especially once history is built up to match against. AI categorization is also helpful starting out with no history. I still get to see every transaction but avoid the tedium of importing everything manually.
• With AI receipt parsing, I no longer have to manually go through every box store receipt to split items into their respective categories
• I can track my daily net worth over time
• I can save receipts to specific transactions, especially helpful for HSA expenses, charitable giving, etc.
• I can easily track expenses where I expect reimbursements (i.e. a friend is going to pay me back for lunch) without it affecting my budget
• I have the optionality of doing 0 sum every month or can carry over the surplus and assign it in any future month.
• Full Sankey drilldowns (Account > Category > Subcategory > Location > Transaction) are great to explore
• Automatic recurring transaction detection with price change alerts
• Mortgage amortization tables with extra payment options and debt payoff plans (avalanche or snowball)
• Monthly statements that give a full financial overview are easy to share and review with my spouse

Cons:

• The app purposefully does not use bank-linking, which may not be what most users want.
• Accounts, Budgets with categories, Savings goals, etc. are all set up how each user sees fit, which means the initial start-up can take some time and effort.
• You need at least a complete month of data to really see the full benefits of the app

The web app is desktop-first but has a dedicated mobile view. You can save the website to your phone to have it act like a normal mobile app for easy receipt uploading.

There are a million other budget apps out there now, but I do hope someone finds this one helpful. There is a contact form where you can submit any feature requests, which I would be happy to build if it adds value for everyone.

I have implemented a 2-week trial for the app–no payment info is needed to create a login and start using it. After that, it is $5.99/mo or $59.99/yr if you choose to continue. I have offered free budgeting tools in the past, and I am trying to keep the price low here, but there is a real cost to me for each user (AI API calls, storage, compute, etc.).

If curious, my background is in engineering & finance and have been an Excel power budgeter up to this point, tracking every transaction my family and I have made for the last 10 years.

You can find more info at www.thepennytracker.com

Any feedback here is welcome!

Hey r/PFtools,

If you are looking for a clean personal finance manager that does not demand your private bank passwords, show ads, or force you into expensive annual subscriptions, I built MoneySplit as an offline-first alternative.

MoneySplit is a 4.9-Star rated budget manager designed around the core principles of Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL)—helping you evaluate your spending in terms of real life energy, conscious consumption, and true financial independence.

Key Tool Features:

• Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL) Alignment: Track your real hourly wage and evaluate every expense against the actual life energy spent earning it, helping you break impulse buying habits.

• 100% Private & Password-Free: No Plaid logins or bank passwords required. Your financial data stays 100% securely on your local device. Zero cloud tracking or data sales.

• 1-Tap Bank Statement Import: Drag and drop CSV or PDF bank statements from any bank for instant category breakdown.

• Automatic Bank SMS Tracker: Automatically parses bank text alerts into organized monthly category budgets.

• Subscription & Debt Manager: Spot forgotten recurring charges before your card is billed, and calculate credit card debt payoff schedules.

• Google Drive Backup: Export clean CSVs to Excel anytime or backup to your personal Google Drive account.

I would love for this community to check it out and share your thoughts, tool feedback, or feature requests!

Google Play Store Link: MoneySplit

I kept seeing the same confusion about the new One Big Beautiful Bill deductions — especially that overtime only deducts the premium half, and that "no tax on tips / SS" is a deduction, not tax-free income — so I built a small set of free calculators, one per deduction, all based on the finalized IRS rules (caps, MAGI phase-outs, the qualifying-occupation list, the sunset after 2028).

No signup, no ads on the calculators, no data collection. Disclosure: they're mine and the site is free.

• No Tax on Overtime (premium-only + phase-out): https://newdeductioncalc.com/no-tax-on-overtime-calculator/
• No Tax on Tips (checks the IRS occupation list): https://newdeductioncalc.com/no-tax-on-tips-calculator/
• Trump Account balance projector: https://newdeductioncalc.com/trump-account-calculator/
• Senior deduction: https://newdeductioncalc.com/senior-deduction-calculator/
• OBBBA overview hub: https://newdeductioncalc.com/obbba-deduction-calculator/

Happy to take feedback on the math or add cases people are running into.

Hello, I am the founder of https://wealthmode.io/, built in Hamilton, ON, for a long time I looked for a replacement of Mint, which is where I felt most comfortable, I know there's a plethora of apps out there, but none made me feel really comfortable.

I am a senior software engineer, so eventually decided to invest and create my own product, I am using it for my own finances and pretty happy with the result, the feedback I got from the first few hundred users were mostly positive, I was trying to perfect it before going to bigger communities on reddit and putting any money on ads.

I would like to hear from more people as this community is huge, whoever wants to try it, I would appreciate it, for the people that are still not happy with a solution, what is missing? What are you looking for in these apps?

What are the most important things to you? Reports? Budgets? Tracking investments?

At the moment it's a solid personal finance app for transactions/budgeting, the next 2 big things that I'm working on are

1. The investment side of it (replacing something like Wealthica), which is something not even Mint had, a single app for personal finances (transactions, budget) and investment portfolio tracking.
2. Native mobile apps, I worked hard on having a pretty good usability for mobile web, as most people use it on phones, but I know people really love native apps, so that's coming soon as well.
3. A lot of apps are adding chatbots to chat about your finances, as an user I don't like that. But I'm not sure if other users are wanting that or not, how do you feel about it?
4. There's a feature that I'm on the fence about, that im not sure if people really need that or not, which is shared access for households.

FAQ:

1. How's the security? We use the highest standards of security, data is encrypted at rest using AES-256, read-only access to your data, using Plaid which is the industry standard, same thing you had on Plaid. I'm a senior SWE, not a vibe coder that doesn't know what he's doing.
2. How about problematic banks for auto sync, like CIBC. As mentioned above, Plaid is the industry standard, so the fault is not on the apps, CIBC protocol sucks, so every app will have the same problem.
3. What's the trick with the free tier ? There's no trick, I'm not selling any data, users that use free tier are usually not heavy load users, it's not a big deal for me to maintain that and the feedback is valuable, the goal is always to eventually convert these users into paid users.

I track basically everything financially but I still feel like I’m stuck in the same place. like I have the data but it’s not translating into better decisions which is frustrating.

I built Zynex because I'm its target user. My money was scattered across multiple bank accounts and cards, and I never had one clear picture of where I actually stood.

So I built the app I wanted: one place that pulls all your accounts, cash and assets into a single clear picture, and uses AI to make logging effortless. You just speak a transaction out loud, snap a receipt, or type a quick note — and AI turns it into a clean entry in seconds. No forms.

It's the app I now reach for every day myself.

Zynex is live on Google Play, landing page here: https://zynex.finance/ — I'd genuinely love your feedback on the idea or the flow.

Like everyone else, “I wanted to build a tool that does X so I did”. Here were my requirements: no accounts, no App Store (for now), and I wanted to see every possible lever.

My tool focuses on future cash flow, retirement, net worth, taxes, and goal setting.

Features:
- Compare state taxes
- Plan for: retirement, children, college funds, yearly vacations, estate estimates
- When can I buy a house?
- Should I do standardized or itemized deductions?

Why use YAPFT? It’s open source and free. No account needed, no billing, nothing.

Enter your parameters and see what sort of life you could have in +2yrs, when the kids go college, or if you decide to move to Texas in 10 years.

Why “Free for now”?
Open source tools still cost money to host, run, develop, support. But the core engines, those are always free and you can audit the code anytime.

At this stage, I’m looking for feedback and stress tests.

Please note: YAPFT is not tax advice. It is a simulation and planning tool. Always consult a professional.

I wanted a simple overview of my subscriptions. So I tried the popular tracker apps, and every single one had the same first step: "Connect your bank account."

Hand my banking credentials to a startup so it can... read a list I already know? No thanks.

So I built SubTrack — a subscription tracker that works the old-fashioned way: you type in your subscriptions yourself. Takes about 2 minutes for most people, and in exchange:

• No bank connection, ever. There's literally nothing sensitive to leak.
• No selling your transaction data to "trusted partners."
• No "we noticed you shop at..." creepiness.

What you get:

• Total monthly + yearly spend, updated live
• "Next payment: Netflix, $15.49, in 3 days" — always visible
• Email reminder days before a renewal so you can cancel in time
• A "pause" state for subscriptions you're on the fence about
• Step-by-step cancel guides for 45+ services

It's free, no credit card. I'm a solo dev and I'm looking for testers — especially people who can tell me where the manual-entry approach gets annoying, because that's the trade-off I chose.

https://subtrack.profidesigner.eu

Would you trade 2 minutes of typing for never connecting your bank to a random app? Genuinely curious where Reddit lands on this.

Does anyone else have no idea what to actually do with their student loans?

I had 6 loans across different rates and genuinely didn't know which one to pay first, how much interest I was losing every day, or when I'd actually be done paying them off.

So I built Zerova to answer those questions with my actual numbers. It told me I was losing $2.34 every single day in interest and that I should attack my 4.53% loan first before anything else.

What it does:

- Shows your real debt-free date based on what you're actually paying

- Tracks exactly how much interest is building every day on each loan

- Tells you which loan to target first and why, based on your actual rates and balances

- Compares Avalanche vs Snowball strategies with your real numbers

- Handles $0 payment situations correctly for people in forbearance or deferment

- Saves your payment schedule so you don't have to manually update every time you log in

- AI-powered weekly summary emailed every Sunday

Works for federal and private loans. 14-day free trial, then $7/month or $60/year if you find it useful.

zerova.org

Happy to answer questions about how it works or what I built it with.

I put together EasyTools.ca, a collection of free calculators aimed at Canadian specific numbers that a lot of generic calculator sites get wrong or don't cover (CPP/EI deductions, provincial tax brackets, mortgage stress test, etc).

It's not trying to be flashy, just quick and accurate tools for stuff I kept needing to calculate myself and couldn't find a solid Canadian version of. 42 calculators so far covering mortgages, pay and income, and taxes.

Sharing a tool I built (free right now) in case it's useful here - and because I want honest feedback.

My Financial Freedom Tracker pulls budgeting, net worth tracking, and financial planning into a single connected dashboard. The goal was to stop switching between a budgeting app, broker logins, and spreadsheets that never agree.

What makes it different from a standalone budgeting app: the three modules feed each other, so your budget, your real net worth, and your long-term projection stay in sync.

I'm at 1,000+ users and starting to think about a paid tier to keep it alive, so this is a good moment to ask:

• What feature would you need before it replaced your current stack?
• What would you expect to stay free vs. be worth paying for?

Link: https://myfinancialfreedomtracker.com/