I am using actual budget (which is free and open source) for this exact use case. It won't notify you but it has dashboard that can show you how you are spending
Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
11–20 of 111 posts
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#12I tried budgeting, but found it to be too much work because there's no perfect way to automate it. Also, if you are card churning you soon end up with many accounts to keep track of making manual tracking a real chore.
I've settled for using Projection Lab to keep of my net worth and have monthly targets to hit. There's still work to do. But it's much easier since I only care about the totals.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#13I highly recommend LunchMoney (https://lunchmoney.app/). It's built by a solo developer who is very responsive and continues to make the app great. Lots of automation and ability to create custom classification rules. I've been happy for the past 3 years.
I've also heard good things about CoPilot (https://copilot.money/) but have not had the chance to experiment with it yet.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#14I'm a big fan of Tiller [1], which is a paid service that basically just connects Yodlee to Google Docs or Excel. It will dump all your transactions and balance info into a spreadsheet and you can do what you want with it. It also has lots of templates for things like budgeting etc. I run a daily cron job that loads the transaction data and produces a nice Jupyter-based report. It will require some custom building, but the API plumbing is done for you.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#15I have tried all - Mint and many others. They were either too complex or weren't privacy friendly to my likings.
In the end, i ended up creating a simple react app. All the data is stored in a single json file that I sync. I load web app/app and just upload this json file.
Uses react-spreadsheet so all fields are editable.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#16I highly recommend LunchMoney ( https://lunchmoney.app/ ). It's built by a solo developer who is very responsive and continues to make the app great. Lots of automation and ability to create custom classification rules. I've been happy for the past 3 years. I've also heard good things about CoPilot ( https://copilot.money/ ) but have not had the chance to experiment with it yet.
+1 to LunchMoney, it's amazing, I'm a very happy user
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#17After more than a decade of trying to find a good one, the only thing I learned and I would share: if you’ve spent the money it’s already late tracking it.
Instead of tracking your expenses, create a budget in an Excel sheet, put aside the money for your regular expenses immediately after you get your salary, then invest the rest (create an investment plan) or transfer to a savings account.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#18I've tried a bunch, and while I'm reluctant to recommend a Quicken product, Quicken Simplifi is actually working out really well for my family and I. The UI is similar to Mint & it supports Apple Pay. I used to export all my data from Mint to a CSV for further cleanup/analysis, but the built-in tools in Simplifi are good enough now that I just do everything inside the app.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#19YNAB generally gets mentioned as one of the de factor budgeting options. I used it a lot a few years ago and it works. Their system is a little wonky if you aren't used to the envelope method but they have great docs, a great little podcast and a healthy community.
Love YNAB, been using it since 2011 and never switched to their subscription cloud service. YNAB Classic still works, though I don’t think you can legally acquire it anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
#20I've settled on good old fashioned spreadsheets. Why? One, I pay cash as much as I possibly can (fuck surveillance finance), so using something that brings in my transactions isn't that much of a time savings. I have a minimal number of monthly scheduled transactions, so bringing those in manually just isn't really that painful. Two, it adds a tiny bit of friction to my spending. This is a good thing (at least for me…
You could combine this with a quick cronjob to send notifications about daily/weekly spending but I don’t know an easy way to send texts without dipping into Twilio, which is difficult. If you’re okay having emails notify you, that might work.
Maybe enter purchases in a linked spreadsheet from your phone to your desktop to track purchases? Might just be better off sucking up purchase information from your bank’s API to your spreadsheet. Smaller bank APIs tend to suck though.