Problem
Rigid apps punish a skipped day, small expenses add up unseen, and receipts get lost across email, photos and drawers.
Finance apps were too rigid for real life, so I built one that isn't
My best friend and I wanted to get our money in order. We tried several apps, premium ones included, and kept quitting. They demanded discipline up front and never solved the two things we cared about: the small daily leaks, and paying bills on time with proof that we did.
- Role
- Product designer and builder
- Year
- 2026
- Type
- Personal finance, mobile web
- Stack
- React, NestJS, Prisma, MariaDB, Firebase Auth, Tesseract.js
$0
per scanned receipt
Solution
Nothing blocks you. Scan a receipt and it's read, categorized by your own rules and kept as proof.
Results
In daily use since January 2026, loaded with years of my own payment records, at zero cost per scan.
Design challenge
How do you build a money app that still works the week you forget to use it?
Issue #1
Rigid apps punish you for a missed day, so this one suggests and never blocks
Two rules decided everything. The transaction log is the core: balances, budgets, debts and goals are calculated from it, so there's nothing to reconcile by hand. And no rigidity: a transaction without a category can still be saved.
When in doubt, I asked which option would make someone quit, and picked the other one.
Issue #2
Proof of payment kept getting lost, so a receipt becomes a record and stays as proof
Take a photo or drop a PDF. The app pulls out amount, date and concept and files it with each person's rules. The original stays attached, searchable by category, concept or month.
Add screens or video here
Issue #3
Sending every receipt to an AI API was overkill, so the OCR runs on the person's device
Reading a receipt doesn't need a language model. Tesseract.js and pdf.js run in the browser, so a scan costs nothing and the document never goes to a third-party model.
The architecture is portable on purpose: free today, movable to professional infrastructure without rewriting the business logic.
Not every problem needs AI. Picking the cheapest tool that does the job is a design decision too.
Issue #4
Financial records deserve a security review, so I kept it to three users
Me, my best friend and a friend who asked to join. It's free for friends and family and not open to the public until a full-stack developer reviews it.
Results
What changed
I've used it every day since January 2026, with years of payment receipts loaded in.
Jan 2026in daily use since
0API calls per scan
3users, by choice
What I took from it
Rigid software doesn't create discipline. It creates abandoned apps.