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Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

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Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#121

Post by lifeformed »

Nice! I'd would love to replace my custom system with this if some of the following features were implemented:

- A subcategory or tagging system. When viewing the budget, I could just filter those items. This would be nice for my side business stuff, so I could have categories like "biz->income" and "biz->hosting", and then just view the "biz" category to see multiple flows. Or more simply, I don't necessarily need subcategories if I could just view multiple budget categories in one view.

- When choosing a category when approving transactions, it would be nice to be able to type to search the category

- Also when approving transactions, when I click on the checkmark, I'd prefer if they either disappeared instantly or just didn't disappear at all. Right now I'm afraid to click multiple items quickly since I might mis-click when it disappears unexpectedly, clicking on the next line. I think it's important to remove all friction from the transaction approval section, since that's the most commonly used part.

- How do I categorize recurring expenses? It doesn't seem like I can. Why not?

- Some way of showing big, unique groups of expenses, such as a wedding, or vacation, or buying a computer. I wouldn't want to factor that into my monthly budget, but I'd like to see the total costs of this years "special expenses". Maybe I could tag transactions as "coast trip" or "gaming pc" or "wedding", and then view all special expenses as their own category?

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#122

Post by Fiahil »

oarsinsync wrote: post #102
Fiahil wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested a lot of similar project in the past 2 years: Buxfer, GNUCash, YNAB 4 & 5, Mint, and Banktivity (currently using) and I'm willing to pay as high as $70 per year for a product that fulfills my needs. I liked your project, the interface is clean, responsive and fast. If I may, I would like to give you my list of the most useful features : - Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an…

> Banktivity (currently using) > - Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an _absolute_ requirement. Based on the rest of your post, your feature requirement list matching my own, as well as the privacy aspect, how do you reconcile the forced cloud-sync aspect of Banktivity? There doesn't appear to be an option to use anything except that which results in them getting an (encrypted) copy o…

I bought their software but I didn't log in their app. Without and ID or Direct access configured, they can't sync with their remote services.

I'm backing up the file using an encrypted git repository to a local NAS.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#123

Post by Fiahil »

jmiserez wrote: post #95
Fiahil wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested a lot of similar project in the past 2 years: Buxfer, GNUCash, YNAB 4 & 5, Mint, and Banktivity (currently using) and I'm willing to pay as high as $70 per year for a product that fulfills my needs. I liked your project, the interface is clean, responsive and fast. If I may, I would like to give you my list of the most useful features : - Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an…

Any thoughts on GoodBudget? It's what I've been using for the last couple of years and it does not link bank accounts (and I wouldn't want it to). Long term I'm looking for something self-hosted too, but I think we're a very small subset of users.

I didn't try GoodBudget, but I'm more of a Mac/ipad user for that sort of things.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#124

Post by kryptographs »

jnfr wrote: post #111
Improvotter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm moving soon and could use the multicurrency support. I'm also graduating college so got to do all of this on my own now, I guess I'm your perfect new customer. Compared to all of the other apps, why would I for example choose you? Do you also have some more information on the credit card linking? Do you support debit cards? This is crucial to be honest. And what about UK bank accounts?

Congratulations on graduating college and good luck with the upcoming move! We currently use Plaid to connect to bank accounts which unfortunately only supports US/Canadian banks, so you might be out of luck for now if you were hoping for automatic imports. We are working on more ways beyond Plaid to import your transactions so if you would like, you can sign up for our mailing list to keep updated on our progress an…

Hi there! Keith here from Plaid. We launched in the UK back in May this year - check out our blog post here https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-in-the-uk/ and feel free to shoot us an email at europe@plaid.com if we can be of any help getting you set up!

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#125

Post by kryptographs »

t0astbread wrote: post #106
jnfr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Plaid ( https://plaid.com ) which also powers many other financial apps.

Oh cool they actually use the PSD2 in Europe

Yes we do! Keith here from Plaid. If you want more info, shoot us an email at europe@plaid.com -- and if you happen to be in London next week, we’re doing a demo of our Open Banking/PSD2 integrations hosted by TechHub. You can get tickets here https://www.techhub.com/event/techhubtuesday-demo-night-26/

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#126

Post by Fiahil »

appleflaxen wrote: post #105
Fiahil wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested a lot of similar project in the past 2 years: Buxfer, GNUCash, YNAB 4 & 5, Mint, and Banktivity (currently using) and I'm willing to pay as high as $70 per year for a product that fulfills my needs. I liked your project, the interface is clean, responsive and fast. If I may, I would like to give you my list of the most useful features : - Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an…

can you provide a comparison of the products you've used?

Absolutely ! Here is a small personal description of the tools I used :)

- YNAB 4: Wonderful tool ! Simple, efficient, and locally available ! I was not a big fan of their budgeting strategies/options (especially when you go over the allocated envelopes) and I wanted more reports.

- YNAB 5: The interface was nice, but it was not self-hosted. It has the same negative points as YNAB 4. So I decided I won't pay for it.

- GNUCash: I don't remember testing it for a long time. It was self-hosted, and the reason I'm not using it today is probably personal taste.

- Ledger: Amazing. The CLI interface was too arcane for me.

And now, the bad experiences:

- Mint: Kept trying to sell me stuff. Not self-hosted. My financial institution was not available for linking, and I think they were using my transaction information to train their ML models on category assignments. Their automatic categorization was - of course - shitty.

- Buxfer: It started well, but then quickly degraded. I linked only one of the financial institution I use. They were accessing my personal account automatically without my approval (I had connection alerts in my bank's interface, and they were popping everyday at midnight). They kept accessing my bank account, even when I disabled the sync and deleted the bank account from the interface. Their automatic category assignment was - again - shitty (spoiler alert: IT'S ALWAYS SHITTY), but they offered rule-based category assignment ! Their account reconciliation was not accounting-ly correct (they changed the balance without adding a rectification transaction, so sum(transactions) == account_balance, would be false >https://www.buxfer.com/help/reports)". Well, not-excluding my travel expenses from reports give me a completely inaccurate view of my finances and leads to even more confusion. Bonus : they were unresponsive to support and feature requests and I was on the PRO plan before they introduced the PRIME one.

Generally, online services are very bad at automatic category assignment. You will absolutely be exposed if they don't maintain a high-level security practice. They can be acquired by bigger companies, they can be terminated because they lacked funds. They will do "UI improvements" when you don't want that and they will clusterfuck a perfectly working version once in a while. They can also keep your data hostage, remove the "export" button, "reorganize" their pricing every 2 years and more.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#127

Post by Fiahil »

wellpast wrote: post #90
Fiahil wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested a lot of similar project in the past 2 years: Buxfer, GNUCash, YNAB 4 & 5, Mint, and Banktivity (currently using) and I'm willing to pay as high as $70 per year for a product that fulfills my needs. I liked your project, the interface is clean, responsive and fast. If I may, I would like to give you my list of the most useful features : - Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an…

This is a great list of my exact same needs. I believe that the correct solution is a desktop application. How many of you/us do you think there are? And how much would you/they pay for this?

For people already tracking their finances, more than half of the one I talked to prefer self-hosting. I would personally pay as high as 70 EUR a year. Amazon prime is 50 EUR, Netflix 144 EUR, Spotify 180 EUR.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#128

Post by solarkraft »

jnfr wrote: post #53
solarkraft wrote: post #44

$3 per month or $29 per year for now . Why should I use a service hosted by someone else for something this important? Not only will I (besides losing money) have to worry about not being able to access my data, but especially about somebody else accessing it.

I suppose it could be more clear that you would be _locking in_ that pricing, so there is no need to worry about that shooting up to something crazy after a period of usage :)

You managed to calm me about the pricing, but I still don't see why this app would need to be hosted at all, considering I wouldn't use the bank import anyway.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#129

Post by dr_roots »

Looks like an awesome product! I've used Ynab for a while, but since I'm not based in the US bank imports were not useful to me and didn't justify the price. Since then, I've been actively looking for a budgeting app that would fit my needs. Will definitely try this one.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#130

Post by _august »

aflag wrote: post #38

I'm on the phone right now, it's not clear in the bit of the site I can see. But is it possible to run it on the desktop, entirely offline?

I would love a simple electron wrapper around this, perhaps with offline capabilities slowly added over time.
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