[jmathai]

Congrats on the launch.

I don’t know how folks manage to consistently budget if they have to enter transactions manually.

After trying a bunch of overly complex budgeting apps like ynab - I wrote one for my wife and I (it used to be open for others). https://fiers.co/features/spend

I’m using a developer plaid account (free) to download transactions. Works pretty well - we are goin on 4 years of budgeting and it’s been great.

[speg]

That’s awesome. One of our New Year’s resolutions was to track our expenses and budget better this year so after making a spreadsheet in January, I wrote a simple Django app last week to import our transactions and start categorizing them. Perhaps I should’ve done a bit more market research, and looked into things like this!

[wingerlang]

The frontpage isn't really clear. Not sure what the red circles have to do with the text. The screenshots barely show anything, and I am inclined to believe the app is more of a financial independence calculator than expense tracker? Sure there is some overlap but I'm still confused.

[jmathai]

There's a financial independence forecast that is separate from the budgeting app. The site is more focused on the forecast tool.

What I came to learn was that the forecast was predicated on having a predictable outflow of expenses which is what led us to start budgeting - hence the app, after a bit of research [1].

[1] https://fiers.co/article/building-a-simple-budgeting-tool-as...

[mackrevinack]

does ynab still make you enter things manually? i think i remember reading some ynab blog posts years ago where they were implying that they kept it manual by design so that you would be taking a more active role in your budgeting every day, compared to something that added everything automatically. it makes sense but it could have also just been an excuse at the time because its complicated to add support for that type of thing

[vxNsr]

YNAB supports auto imports. They use both Plaid and MX. Initially they only used MX, but then for whatever reason there was a point where they were trying to drop MX but they gave up when plaid proved to be more (or just as) unreliable, now they use both. Each user is only supposed to use one or the other. You don’t get to choose they assign it to you randomly when you sign up, you’ll know based on the UI which you got. If a specific bank is having trouble connecting, support can manually set that bank for that user to be through the other service, I’ve had to do this a few times. Their support is stellar, still I wish banks provided better APIs.

They’ve raised their prices recently which got a lot of people very upset. A few went off on their own to create a new budgeting app, but since then most of those efforts died due to the giant undertaking it is as mentioned upthread. I don’t think any of those efforts made it to the auto import stage.

[earthling8118]

They have automatic input now for sure, but I believe it is only through plaid. I couldn't find a list but there are banks that can talk with plaid without requiring you give them your password and it works well enough.

Without automatic input it would be much less worth it. Sure, mindfulness and all. But that's a lot of effort to do. When you use the automatic one it can even sort the categories in most cases by matching the last category used for that store

[Nyoxide]

Congrats, it looks nice !