Show HN: Write It Down – Personal finance tracker
write-it-down.comLately I’ve been exploring smaller, simpler projects like this one. I usually build backend systems (currently at Browser Use, funny enough).
This spreadsheet started as a personal finance tracker during COVID and somehow turned into something people actually wanted to use.
The biggest lesson for me: People don’t care how “advanced” something is, they just want it to work and make their life easier.
Curious to hear what you all think.
Popular culture has always been easy to influence. We had blockchain hype, OOP hype, AI hype, Microservices hype, we had so many and they were ALL mostly a fad that resulted in yet-another-tool in the toolbelt of engineers -- nothing more, nothing less.
Good on you for using the right tools to build a new thing!
Codegen AI is great for tab-complete. It does save typing, and it is pretty smart, but you still have to have an engineer in the seat that is paying attention and knows what they're doing.
Video AI on the other hand is already disrupting Hollywood. The costs are 10,000x cheaper, the delivery time is 100,000x faster, and it's accessible with 1,000x less personnel. These are insane numbers. Multiple orders of magnitude - full step function change - across multiple dimensions at once.
You still need to have an editor and VFX person to make video AI work, and you still need to incorporate photon-on-glass footage, but it's remarkable how usable these tools are.
A small studio with five people can use AI tools to do serious work that would ordinarily take 100 people or more and require huge budgets.
This isn't just hypothesizing - I work in this industry. This is not only myself, but this is dozens of the studios I talk to and work with.
Just to cite one example, there's a studio I know that used to bid $300k on projects. You've seen their work - they do Netflix show intro sequences, pharmaceutical ads, etc. They're now bidding just $50k and winning projects left and right.
I think the biggest area of AI investment and disruption is going to be video AI.
Baffling.
Same with microservices or misusing HTML to make UIs instead of documents etc.
If you're already doing all those things, the best way you can help your personal finances is to make good decisions and work hard and with integrity in other areas of your life: grow your career and income, position yourself smartly to lower your odds of layoffs / termination / etc., take care of your health to avoid health-related income disruptions and costs (this includes mental health!), and make smart relationship choices (i.e., don't end up in divorce).
Personal finance is pretty much a solved problem. Breakthrough results generally come from personal and moral discipline sustained consistently over a long period of time. Simple tools like this can help a lot -- I like it.
That perhaps is doing a lot of lifting.
Tax season in the US is in about six months - I look forward to hearing how your experiment goes!
For Americans, if you didn't know, you can check your IRS transcripts at https://www.irs.gov/ to see exactly how much the IRS thinks you've earned.
Honestly, yes there shouldn't really even be a discussion about this. US should definitely do it. I think US and India are the only two major countries still stuck on something like this and I am not sure if there are really any advantages of it.
Keep in mind a 5% failure rate would likely be >10 million incorrect tax filings per year solely due to AI errors, not inclusive of additional incorrect filings due to human error as well.
It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe it would be better than having to do it all manually.
I think AI hallucination rate is already below my own hallucination rate, especially in a boring/unknown domain
AI models output is always overly confident. And when you correct them they will almost always come up with something like "Ah, you're totally right" and switch around the output (unless there are safeguards / deep research involved).
AI doesn't push back, therefore you more often than not don't second guess your own thoughts. This is, in essence, the most valuable tool in discussions with other humans.
There are insights to derive from the data - like how much do you really spend. But again its really hard to get there because the numbers are always off and most people don't actually want to know.
You are severely underestimating the average person's agency with their money.
Writing it down yourself is still the best option for me at this point. I feel on top of things.
Trust my excel sheet much much more.
Honestly for everyone I know this is how they do it. There is one guy who built his own app and his is perfect because he has solved for his specific bank accounts.
He knows every $ coming in and going out - its pretty impressive.
Good advice except for this. In today’s society you’ll lose 10/10 times to somebody who’s working hard and doesn’t have any integrity. See Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.
Living with integrity doesn't mean you can't be highly competitive or make emotionally difficult decisions in a professional context. But it does mean avoiding the kind of personal debt that can detonate your life in a way that most people, unlike Musk or Altman, can't truly get away with.
Said differently, taking moral shortcuts in your career might seem to work in isolation, but doing so in all aspects of your life tends to accrue real consequences that compound over time. And most folks who take moral shortcuts aren't capable of constraining that behavior to a single domain of their life over time. It's like an infection that spreads and is hard to control. Add in any kind of latent substance use risk -- common throughout the adult US population in general -- and successful, talented people end up in the second half of their life nowhere near where their financial potential was.
I argued that the the first priority should be maintaining a consistent $5k in the main chequing account and calling that the the rainy day money, since doing so would cause us to have a $20/mo service fee waived and we'd avoid the semi-regular NSF feeds we were getting dinged with from preauth utility bill debits.
Monthly interest of 2% on $5k is only about $8 a month; our interest rate would have needed to be 5%+ before it was worth it earning that before first getting the account fee cleared (or, of course, just switching to a bank that offered fee-free chequing accounts).
For most people just keeping tabs of spending helps them reign it in. Setting up auto savings and pension contributions also helps. The next step is using cash to pay for discretionary spending - not more automation.
the point is, seen critically, it's obvious that it's not even a replacement for a calculator. yet the hype pushes on with infinite exceptions "oh, its not the best for this that i know about, but everything else I'm not an expert I will clai AI is perfect"
What?
/s
Ofc you can always put it on a sheet of paper :P Thats the OG method.
(I thought they used free google drive accounts to train Gemini, but I can't find where I saw that now. Does anyone have a reference?)
In any case, didn't feel like it when writing haha.
Do you know why it sounds like that?
Neither do I.
It's a feeling.
Seriously. Is there any problem with "AI-sounding" writing? It's grammatically correct. It's readable. The only issue I can possibly think of is that you perceive AI negatively, and that you project this negativity onto everything that tangentially touches AI.
It’s overly verbose. It’s repetitive. It’s boring. It doesn’t flow right.
If people don’t want to read what you wrote about your product, they won’t use (let alone pay for) your product. Pointing out bad copy is perfectly valid and helpful criticism.
Compare with what I think a lot of us are highly used to reading, which is copy written by salespeople, or by management-minded people with sales in mind.
IMO, the way the copy is written is not like minimally-guided AI, aside from the clarity (which is the good part of AI writing). AI has a different character/tone. It tends to sound a little more like a salesperson, or a 50's PSA video.
(See LinkedIn posts from before 2020 - they're only missing the emoji basically.)
It’s bonkers that using good grammar and punctuation is now considered a bad thing on the internet.
While the world was doing Y, I was doing Z.
Everyone’s doing X. I’m quietly [ChatGPT loves that word] doing Y.
People don’t X. They Y. It’s not about Z. It’s about W, and it taught me everything/means everything to me/utterly transformed me/etc.
Do X. Do Y. Even if it’s just Z.
I just wanted to share something I have built for myself and other people seem to like it!
Did most start using it when it was a free spreadsheet linked to a reddit post or have the 2300 users all bought the $4.99 product?
Has there been a change in take-up since you monetised it?
If I let it be automatic, I quickly lose grip.
Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.
Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.
Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.
This is solved via LLMs that can transcribe, categorise, convert messy records into structured book keeping.
I remain unconvinced that anything more rigid is more useful.
But will give him feedback!
I think saying _just_ a simple spreadsheet makes it sound like a bad thing. Actually, the simplicity is probably one of the key selling points! I wish more things were just spreadsheets.
Also I’m extremely skeptical of your pricing. $5 one time seems too good to be true.
OP isn't hosting anything and has 0 costs apart from domain registration and website hosting.
Monarch comes close
If there were a standardized way to pull your own data from banks, we wouldn’t need to use snoopware, vendor locked apps.
This is the essence of how we should think about building products (or, at the very least, doing some projects). I see so many of my juniors are building "useless" stuff just to participate in the AI hype. Whereas simple and elegant solutions are often neglected.
Obviously if a product/idea is good enough it can go 'viral' on its own with little prodding, but I'm curious about the discussion behind that post and how it may have taken on a life of its own.
> Show HN: I built an AI that gives expert-backed blood test insights in seconds (bloodinsightai.com) [1]
You're free to make whatever kind of project you want, but it becomes a bit ironic when every other paragraph in this post is "unlike everyone, I did not chase the AI hype" (the whole post reads like AI prose btw).
Please also note that, while the "Loved by 2360 people" uses images hosted on d145moygdin44j.cloudfront.net, the "testimonials" section has profile pictures that link to the randomuser.me API. This could lead people to believe that the reviews are fake.
This is just a side project I had since 5 years ago. And it just reminded me how simple things can be sometimes. No need to put AI everywhere.
In any case, the reviews are not fake, I talked to these people personally in search for feedback. I am not going to share their personal info ofc.
But will consider improving the site to not make it feel fake!
Huh? You mean that hardcoded text?
<span class="font-bold text-customOrange">2360</span>
But will try to make it more convincing!
> P.s.: Noticed how when people buy the template the number on the landing page increases? Its real.
I did notice, so am I to believe that in the writing of my comment (less than an hour ago), this number jumped from 2300 to a clean 2360 (so a conversion rate of about 2 users per minute), and yet it has not received further updates since? I'm pretty sure that I've been writing for more than a few minutes already.
Also I don't think I've ever seen "inputting false profile images from randomuser.me" as a means to protect the personal infos of your client, if they don't want their name in there, I'm pretty sure they also don't want a fake name and fake image to represent them.
Finally, it's hard to believe that a thriving community of 2360 individual users would translate to a subreddit with... 5 monthly visits. https://www.reddit.com/r/WriteItDownTemplate/ (<- official subreddit listed on your site's page)
The reddit page you posted was made quite some time after the initial post that went "viral" (https://www.reddit.com/r/sheets/comments/178kf81/tracking_fi...). I also haven't put much effort in growing it, sadly.
I understand you might think these people are fake but I am not here to try to prove you wrong. I know what I've built, I know how many people have signed up and requested a copy. What I will do however is fix the landing page so that less people think this is some sort of trick to get people to buy.
In any case, I really do appreciate the feedback!
I agree that putting your personal data into a free Google account indeed isn't a risk of sharing it with third parties. It is a guarantee.
If you use Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube etc, you already share a lot with Google; this spreadsheet is unlikely to make any different. If have managed to de-Google your life, good for you. Don't use this product either.
Other finance apps (I used to use mint.com before they shut down) require direct connections with your bank and investment accounts, generally via Plaid or Yodlee, and sometimes directly. This product avoids all that.
Now I personally don't think it's useful to me, since there are just too many expenses to keep track of, and doing it manually is too much work for me to even attempt. But privacy to Google would be pretty low on my list of concerns when using a spreadsheet.
Feels like a lot of work to me to track everything. And it's impossible to ask my partner to do the same.
It works decently. I got out what i needed and fought very very hard to not go more all in / code dive, etc. I just needed my monthly expense totals, ordered, with some clean-up. The code is so-so, but it mostly got things working in a few shots. Claude being able to iteratively run commands / issue queries while it worked was key to it getting functional, I think. I love that it runs local and spits out plain text for tables and such; to share with my wife i copy pasted some of the output to a text document then added some comments (markdown).
If I hacked on it more, I'd probably re-work the architecture a bit; I think coming up with a good design about how to ingest idempotently, and then how you want to transform transactions (i.e. in place, vs setting up rules / overrides and then generating a computed transactions table) is most important. After each mini feature having the LLM document its usage in the README, and of course committing, was key. It made it very easy to ditch conversations and start new ones, and point to the README / examples (as opposed to compacting prior conversation).
I think your tool at $5 is a great value; I had TONS of fun making the CLI app but it still took me a few hours of focused work in the end spread over a day, and relied on me having very basic prior experience to help steer it. I bet you can charge more while still keeping the product focused / maintenance low, and absolutely think there's a strong need for it -> While I am super tempted to get crazy with my local app and / automating calculations (etc) ultimately just seeing the money in / out, a few categories that I can sum up (groceries, eating out), and the top 15 expenses, that's really all we need to get our budget in place. Kudos on building a real product, esp. on figuring out how to keep it focused, finding the niche, and recognizing the opportunity to capitalize!
EDIT: My actual deps list here.
require (
github.com/BurntSushi/toml v1.5.0
github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles v0.21.0
github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea v1.3.5
github.com/charmbracelet/huh v0.7.0
github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss v1.1.0
github.com/charmbracelet/log v0.4.2
github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 v1.14.22
github.com/spf13/cobra v1.10.1
)And thanks for the kind words! You nailed it, it’s exactly what I wanted for people who don’t want to spend a weekend building a CLI just to track their groceries...
Sometimes a simple spreadsheet does the job!
Finding such opportunities and making them sustainably profitable is truly great.
“Opinions” is a weird way to put it, the typical word there is “testimonials”.
“Get Started” also doesn’t feel right to me, makes me think of a subscription service that will require lots of set up, which seems to be the opposite of what you’re going for.
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