Personal Finance Users Reject Existing Solutions
Users are frustrated with existing personal finance apps that are overly complex, require bank connections, lack shared budgeting features, or fail to maintain user engagement. They've resorted to building their own solutions or reverting to spreadsheets to address these shortcomings. The desire for simplicity, privacy, and collaborative budgeting is a recurring theme.
SOURCES (60)
“This is genuinely one of the more useful things anyone's said to me about this. You're right that "would use it if it synced" isn't real feedback, it's just people describing a different app they already wanted — I've been half-nodding along to a few…”
“not dumb. but the thing you're actually selling isnt the absence of sync, its the noticing, and thats brutally hard to put in a screenshot lol the trap imo is the feedback you're about to get. the first 20 people who bounce will all say some version of "would use it if it connected to my bank" and it reads like a roadmap. it isnt. thats just the people who wanted the other app telling you they wanted the other app what i'd actually watch is whether people who stay past week”
“Thanks! And agree, the chill calculator is simple but it’s very insightful to have that number 😅”
“Great idea. I think you can probably expand it more in future to something like where it also compares offers between multiple payment apps that you are signed up on and suggest?”
“Suggestion. Let other cards suggest themselves as potential solutions. So your app says: you are here use your venture card because xyz. And below that have BOA suggest: our card beats your reward here. One click apply. That’s where you monetize it.”
“Thanks much, appreciate really;) In terms of usefulness, well, I am a visualiser and I really struggle with traditional ways how those apps are… also, their “gamification” is much about the trading more and stuff like that”
CLI/TUI Repo: https://github.com/Helius-Finance/helius-finance-tracker
“I’ve had this idea for an app called Smelt because I hate having small amounts of money stuck on random gift cards that I’ll probably never use again. The idea is that instead of having like $8 at Target, $4 at Starbucks, and $11 somewhere else, you could put them into Smelt and turn them into one useful balance. I used GPT’s Sites to make a fictional demo because I want to find out whether people even understand the idea and would realistically use it before I take it any further. https://smelt”
“Every money app I have used looks like accounting software or messy dashboards. I wanted one I would actually want to come back to. So I built a living world instead. It runs on your real numbers. Savings become the population. Debt is a volcano sitting in the middle of the map that cools as you pay it down. Investments expand the islands and many more features. Finished a short trailer. What do you think of the money app you are using now? And does the living city thing actually sound appealing”
“I’ve been using daily since 2021, but I’ve revamped a few times as certain portions became outdated.”
“I mean technically you can write the date and price when you buy things into your notes app and after you finished used it the date again and ask ChatGPT: "yo i bought this at x for $x and stopped using it on x, how much $ per day did it cost me" or something. So in my opinion this app is a waste of developers time and money if they publish it somewhere. Its like kinda useful for once or if you download it you think you'll use it but you'll not. But if you still want to make it”
“Thanks so much! Financial minimalism hits the nail on the head. That executive function fatigue is exactly why standard budgeting tools fail I’ve realized, if a utility app feels like a second job, people give up. The goal was to build something you only open for 5 seconds to capture a tax deduction receipt, clear out your wallet, and immediately get on with your day. Appreciate the kind words!”
“I feel like every finance setup I come across is either some massive app connected to everything, or a spreadsheet that looks like it could run a small country. I’m much more interested in something in the middle: keeping a rough eye on monthly expenses, what I have and own, and bigger upcoming costs like holidays. Nothing exact to the cent and nothing that needs daily maintenance. Does anyone here manage their finances like that, or do you eventually end up going either fully automated or full”
“https://reddit.com/link/p78gedj/video/mzhfhga2iymh1/player Here is the preview demo.”
“My day job is estimating commercial electrical projects. About three months ago I had a problem that felt like something I should be able to solve with a spreadsheet: I never really cared what my “monthly budget” was. I wanted to know: After everything that has to happen before my next paycheck, how much money is actually free to spend? So I started building that with Claude Code. Then I kept giving Claude more responsibility. And the scope creep got a little ridiculous. What started as some pay”
“https://preview.redd.it/bwyamzx82ymh1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=f8ad89113a87bf34f3de42b06b992d10eaa459d6 Here is a screenshot.”
“Fiz o Noting, um app pra organizar as finanças sem depender de planilha: você lança o que entra e o que sai, e ele mostra quanto sobra no mês e uma projeção dos próximos 6 meses (contas fixas, parcelas, fatura de cartão calculada certinha). Os dados ficam no aparelho, sem anúncio, sem rastreamento. Aviso: por enquanto o teste está liberado só pro Brasil (restrição da Play Store), e o app é 100% em português. Está em teste fechado na Play Store. Quem entrar agora ganha o Premium de graça quando o”
“The goal of pHinancio is to give you control over your financial data, rather than forcing you to manage everything inside the app. pHinancio imports transaction data from your bank and lets you rename transactions, create your own categories, and set up rules to rename or categorize future transactions automatically. You can also set budgets, track recurring payments such as subscriptions, and sync the data you have already organized to Google Sheets or Airtable. That is pretty much what it doe”
“So, I have to add my investment details and bank account balances into a single database right?”
“bank sync shows you smth like "AMZN MKTP 8442" two days late. Saying it takes 3 seconds and you actually notice you're spending. That noticing is the point. Also works with cash, works outside the US, and nobody gets my bank login.”
This is exactly what I do but I only update once a year for 12/31 values.
“I tried the zero-based / envelope budgeting method a while back (YNAB-style). The method genuinely works — but I kept falling off it. Not because the idea was bad, but because every week felt like a part-time bookkeeping job: categorizing every transaction, moving money between envelopes by hand, re-budgeting from scratch every time I overspent one category. So for the last few weeks I've been building BLAH — Budget Like a Human . Same zero-based envelope logic under the hood, but the app do”
“What do you think about an app where you can learn investing and personal finance using virtual money? Genuinely asking you to give feedback on this idea. submitted by /u/yet-an-other-human [link] [comments]”
“Most people optimizing for leanfire think carefully about subscription costs. Fewer think about what they're paying in data. I was building a finance tracker and wanted to understand what the norm was in the industry. So I actually read through the privacy policies of the most popular budgeting apps. Every single one reserves the right to share your financial data with partners for marketing, analytics, or product improvement. Some anonymize it. Some aggregate it. But they all use it for som”
“I keep track of the running average of my credit card bills and water/gas/electricity bills. I know what my fixed cost bills are (i.e. loans). I project out my income and expenses for YEARS from now. After every payday, anything in my bank over a set amount gets sent to savings. I’m at the point where spending on stupid crap seems like a waste of money, but also if an unexpected expense pops up (“Really? I need to get new brakes?’) or I want to get something nice for me or my wife, it’s no big d”
“I've tried quite a few budgeting / personal finance apps over the years, including YNAB and Monarch, and even paid for some of them. But I always had the same problem. I'd set everything up, use them for a while, and eventually stop. There was usually too much setup, too much going on in the UI, transaction management felt like work, and I never really felt like I was getting much useful insight back from the data I was entering. Eventually I'd just end up back in an Excel sheet. I&#”
You may find these links helpful: Budgeting Tools and spreadsheets r/ynab I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any…
“I used TabTrader for 9 years and when it shut down last week I couldn't really find anything that replaced the parts I actually used, mainly the fast alerts and charting. I started building my own replacement just for myself and it ended up becoming a much bigger project, so I decided to open it up for other people too. It's called TabMira and right now I'm mostly focused on realtime market data, fast alerts and multi-exchange charting. It's free and still very much something I&#”
“I’ve been working on a small Android app called Chipmunk . The idea came from wanting something much simpler than a traditional budgeting/finance app. I wanted to be able to say: $2,000 → Holiday $1,000 → Emergency fund $500 → New phone $300 → Christmas …and then manually track how much I’ve actually allocated to each goal. Most finance apps I looked at seemed to push you toward connecting your bank accounts, creating an account, syncing transactions, subscriptions, etc. So I built the opposite:”
“Hey Redditors, Like many here, I use UPI and card payments for almost everything daily—from quick chai runs and Swiggy orders to monthly bill payments. Over time, manual expense logging became too tedious to stick with, but I was equally uncomfortable using aggregator services which need connection to all bank accounts. To solve this for my own use, I built PaisaLens —an Android tool focused on automated expense tracking with zero cloud sync for financial data and least cost (and also, learn alo”
“just signed up, the plaid flow was smooth but it categorized my monthly venmo rent payment as "shopping", might be worth a tweak in the training data”
“Hey everyone, 22M here, working a full-time job, and for the past year I've been living with a roommate. Every month was the same story: rent, utilities, groceries — someone pays, someone owes, nobody remembers who paid what, and we'd end up doing math on a napkin at 11pm. I looked at existing budgeting apps and expense-splitting apps (Splitwise-type ones), but I couldn't find one that did both well — a real shared household budget AND automatic settling of who-owes-who, in one place”
“That is completely fair, and transparency is super important to me! Here is the exact data path and architecture: 1. Data Storage & E2EE: The backend is hosted on Supabase (PostgreSQL). The biggest privacy feature is that all transaction data (amounts, merchants, balances) is End-to-End Encrypted (E2EE) . When you install the app, it generates an AES-256 master key stored locally in your device's Secure Enclave/Keychain. The data is encrypted on your device before it is synced to the dat”
“Not live yet, just a landing page to gauge interest before committing to build. The idea: instead of monthly category totals, detect specific recurring patterns (same day, same time, same merchant) and estimate what trimming one is worth. Link: https://claude.ai/code/artifact/e0d26e14-0b81-48b0-a297-92c67d55de19 . Would especially love feedback on whether the "day + time" specificity feels genuinely useful or like overkill. submitted by /u/Exotic-Election-6948 [link]”
“I'd document the full data path, not just say parsing is local. Where are records stored, what gets backed up, and does any transaction text reach your server? A simple architecture and permissions page would make the privacy claim much easier to evaluate.”
“I have seen more than a few times on this sub that people are multi-apping, and I am genuinely curious from those that do it, how does this work? I am interested in maximizing my time and money by doing it, but like.. you are really out here taking orders from different apps at the same time? How do you plan your routes? Is it worth it? What if two apps orders are in different directions? Haha.. I am just curious if anyone would be willing to share their logistics and whether or not it would be”
“ty! yah, i added the buffer because i once had my account go below that and i didn't notice haha and yes, the llm categorization works perfectly for emojis 🍕”
“thanks! yah i really just wanted a simple number to follow during my week :) you make a good point - i will say i didn't want users to feel extremely constrained, but i might add different language for users to select from”
“I love the idea, it is simple and explains the math. From my play with your demo: it is probably a little too nice in it's response, which might lead them astray. If you usually spend $25 a day and now you only have $20 a day till payday you probably need the harsh truth more than whether you can technically afford it. Do you really need those new shoes? If not, your more likely to stay under budget if you dont get them.”
“I only consistently use the budgeting and monthly goals tracker I made but when I was in university I literally used it for everything uni related and it still has all my class notes sorted by semester in it etc.”
“This is slick, the $400 buffer is a nice touch instead of just dividing down to zero and pretending life doesnt throw surprise expenses at you does the llm categorization on venmo handle those vague payment descriptions people put, like just a pizza emoji and the word "thanks"”
“hi everyone, recently my partner has been looking to budget her finances better, and she didn't want to manage her finances with an excel spreadsheet, and she didn't like the idea of having to manually look at her transactions and record it. so i built her an app that connects with plaid banking data and produces a spend limit for her daily until her paycheck. the spend limit number basically just takes her current money in accounts, subtracts recurring expenses, credit card balances if”
“the little money always compound you can use that logic and start saving little money too”
“Here is an improvement idea: How about you remove all those random weird moving things from the background of this UI. Website or user interface backgrounds should be minimal and static. Not like a running instance of space tetris on drugs.”
“Hey everyone, I recently moved in with my girlfriend and we started to do our finance together. The problem is neither of us trust putting bank information into budgeting apps no matter how safe they are, it’s just a thing. We also primarily shop at Costco, Walmart, and Target so we can get everything from golf balls to tickets to 10 pounds of granola in one purchase. Most budgeting apps have no way to categorize this beyond “shopping” or split the expenses. So I built Winnow Finance! It a budge”
“yesss! that's exactly what my partner and i wanted too. we have multiple cards and it's hard to track of it all”
I just made myself a personal finance app as well - mostly to get a hold of all of the subscriptions I have (rocket money sucks). I ended up integrating all of…
probably at least partially, most side projects are these days
“Good luck finding people who will share their banking information with a random app, vibe-coded no less”
“hi everyone, recently my partner has been looking to budget her finances better, and she didn't want to manage her finances with an excel spreadsheet, and she didn't like the idea of having to manually look at her transactions and record it. so i built her an app that connects with plaid banking data and produces a spend limit for her daily until her paycheck. the spend limit number basically just takes her current money in accounts, subtracts recurring expenses, credit card balances if”
“Thanks so much for downloading the app and for the feedback! We're really glad you like the UI. And you're absolutely right, adding spending categories can be a little confusing at first. We're already looking into making the onboarding clearer, and a short tutorial for first-time users is a great suggestion. We really appreciate your feedback!”