Making a product flexible often makes it complex to use, complex to develop, and mediocre at everything. Makes it easy for a small product that hyper focuses on one use case to swoop in and snatch users away.
Cheers for answering, was genuinely curious whether it was AI-written, you were doing it tongue in cheek, or that’s just how writing the post came naturally to you.
I feel the AI would've used more words? Maybe? I feel like spotting AI writing is more of a gut feeling for me these days, more so than something I can describe.
Note that this is also just how many engineering-minded people prefer to write when describing a system or tool when the goal is to sell or the audience isn't technical.
Compare with what I think a lot of us are highly used to reading, which is copy written by salespeople, or by management-minded people with sales in mind.
IMO, the way the copy is written is not like minimally-guided AI, aside from the clarity (which is the good part of AI writing). AI has a different character/tone. It tends to sound a little more like a salesperson, or a 50's PSA video.
Seriously. Is there any problem with "AI-sounding" writing? It's grammatically correct. It's readable. The only issue I can possibly think of is that you perceive AI negatively, and that you project this negativity onto everything that tangentially touches AI.
If people don’t want to read what you wrote about your product, they won’t use (let alone pay for) your product. Pointing out bad copy is perfectly valid and helpful criticism.
[I have no personal involvement to this project, but I'll defend it anyway. And I am sure you knew what they meant, but still chose to write a pedantic comment]
If you use Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube etc, you already share a lot with Google; this spreadsheet is unlikely to make any different. If have managed to de-Google your life, good for you. Don't use this product either.
Other finance apps (I used to use mint.com before they shut down) require direct connections with your bank and investment accounts, generally via Plaid or Yodlee, and sometimes directly. This product avoids all that.
Now I personally don't think it's useful to me, since there are just too many expenses to keep track of, and doing it manually is too much work for me to even attempt. But privacy to Google would be pretty low on my list of concerns when using a spreadsheet.
How many expenses do you really have on a daily basis that they are too much to track? I don't like a spreadsheet for this since they have bad input UX on phones. I use a custom app I built and even though it is manual I don't really feel it since I have optimized the UX for n=1 and it just becomes a habit. I tried all these other automatic tracking apps like monarch money,mint,YNAB et al but they are just not real-time enough for me and don't keep me in touch as much, also the obvious data lock. Maybe I'll make it public someday but I haven't mostly because the common sentiment online is 'manual tracking is too much work' when it really isn't if you do it as you go vs all at once at the end of month etc.
Could you please share the original post that you made that has 130k views?
Obviously if a product/idea is good enough it can go 'viral' on its own with little prodding, but I'm curious about the discussion behind that post and how it may have taken on a life of its own.
Wow. How did you do this? This is a saturated field, especially since the downfall of Mint. (Context: I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app. I use it myself, but have 0 users)
> I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app
Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.
Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.
Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.
One big benefit of a google sheet over a web app is that you're not relying on the creator to keep maintaining it. You can copy the sheet and then you have it forever. (Unless Google shuts down sheets, but even for Google that's unlikely.)
I've had a similar one for like two decades, and it originated from another thing that I found around and tweaked to my liking. This spreadsheet sits nicely between the minimal effort and the uber solution of typing everything in some plain text accounting solution.
I feel like the AI hype is big, but there are lots of us who just build normal things and who's jobs cannot allow or make use of LLMs properly.
Popular culture has always been easy to influence. We had blockchain hype, OOP hype, AI hype, Microservices hype, we had so many and they were ALL mostly a fad that resulted in yet-another-tool in the toolbelt of engineers -- nothing more, nothing less.
Good on you for using the right tools to build a new thing!
Agree! I got stuck using hype/trendy solutions to solve problems for far too long... This was proof that sometimes all it takes is a super simple solution.
LLMs are a good search replacement, but they're not task automation.
Codegen AI is great for tab-complete. It does save typing, and it is pretty smart, but you still have to have an engineer in the seat that is paying attention and knows what they're doing.
Video AI on the other hand is already disrupting Hollywood. The costs are 10,000x cheaper, the delivery time is 100,000x faster, and it's accessible with 1,000x less personnel. These are insane numbers. Multiple orders of magnitude - full step function change - across multiple dimensions at once.
You still need to have an editor and VFX person to make video AI work, and you still need to incorporate photon-on-glass footage, but it's remarkable how usable these tools are.
A small studio with five people can use AI tools to do serious work that would ordinarily take 100 people or more and require huge budgets.
This isn't just hypothesizing - I work in this industry. This is not only myself, but this is dozens of the studios I talk to and work with.
Just to cite one example, there's a studio I know that used to bid $300k on projects. You've seen their work - they do Netflix show intro sequences, pharmaceutical ads, etc. They're now bidding just $50k and winning projects left and right.
I think the biggest area of AI investment and disruption is going to be video AI.
On the videogen, one would expect small, scrappy studios to get some tools to get further on their projects. What one has observed is that it is the large behemoths that are overzealous in their use of AI tools, despite the fact that they can produce work, have the budget and expertise to make it happen.
True! At the end of the day, it's a multiplier - just like many other dev hype fads e.g. Python/JavaScript poorly-typed fad of 2010s - devs who do not know what they are doing are just producing worse tech debt at a higher rate.
Same with microservices or misusing HTML to make UIs instead of documents etc.
I think consumer personal finance is hard to disrupt with AI for two reasons: (1) mistakes, hallucinations, etc., aren't acceptable; (2) there really aren't any major secret insights to derive from the data -- just spend within your means, avoid debt or use it sparingly and wisely, target high-interest loans first if you have them, maintain a sufficient emergency fund, max out tax-advantaged accounts, invest in low-fee index funds as much as you can after all of the former. There just isn't much more to it.
If you're already doing all those things, the best way you can help your personal finances is to make good decisions and work hard and with integrity in other areas of your life: grow your career and income, position yourself smartly to lower your odds of layoffs / termination / etc., take care of your health to avoid health-related income disruptions and costs (this includes mental health!), and make smart relationship choices (i.e., don't end up in divorce).
Personal finance is pretty much a solved problem. Breakthrough results generally come from personal and moral discipline sustained consistently over a long period of time. Simple tools like this can help a lot -- I like it.
Being able to weigh the benefits of different places to put money is important too. I had an ex who was big on Ramsey and really wanted to pay down our 1.8% rate mortgage and put "rainy day" money into a savings account that also yielded 1-2%.
I argued that the the first priority should be maintaining a consistent $5k in the main chequing account and calling that the the rainy day money, since doing so would cause us to have a $20/mo service fee waived and we'd avoid the semi-regular NSF feeds we were getting dinged with from preauth utility bill debits.
Monthly interest of 2% on $5k is only about $8 a month; our interest rate would have needed to be 5%+ before it was worth it earning that before first getting the account fee cleared (or, of course, just switching to a bank that offered fee-free chequing accounts).
Untrue - there isn't a personal finance solution that doesn't have mistakes. Not one. I've literally tried them all. Its mostly because the syncing with accounts is very very brittle and a lot of things like stock plans etc aren't supported well so your daily view will always be somewhat off.
There are insights to derive from the data - like how much do you really spend. But again its really hard to get there because the numbers are always off and most people don't actually want to know.
You are severely underestimating the average person's agency with their money.
I use an app but I also have an excel sheet where I track everything very carefully every week or so.
Trust my excel sheet much much more.
Honestly for everyone I know this is how they do it. There is one guy who built his own app and his is perfect because he has solved for his specific bank accounts.
He knows every $ coming in and going out - its pretty impressive.
I think the lack of friction AI has is a real problem.
AI models output is always overly confident. And when you correct them they will almost always come up with something like "Ah, you're totally right" and switch around the output (unless there are safeguards / deep research involved).
AI doesn't push back, therefore you more often than not don't second guess your own thoughts. This is, in essence, the most valuable tool in discussions with other humans.
There are some databases with spending habits, so you can compare your spending to folks with similar households, and some prudent guidelines. But it's not rocket science and a bit silly. You don't really need to remind sneakerheads they spend more than average on shoes, or pennypinchers that they spend (too?) little.
For most people just keeping tabs of spending helps them reign it in. Setting up auto savings and pension contributions also helps. The next step is using cash to pay for discretionary spending - not more automation.
So I’m doing something like this for a legal case I am dealing with for giggles. AI is absolutely giving me bogus answers that I have to fact check. Not sure I would trust it to reconcile items.
Do you have to trust it? Have the AI built a list of all the invoices it can find in your email then a separate application reconciles that against your statements. The AI might miss something or invent something, but the mismatch list you get back should be short.
It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe it would be better than having to do it all manually.
Good advice except for this. In today’s society you’ll lose 10/10 times to somebody who’s working hard and doesn’t have any integrity. See Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.
There are always outlier examples, but for most folks, sacrificing integrity too much will come back to bite them -- marital and family problems, divorce, or personal crises that end up eating through money or having ramifications that affect your career performance are the most common examples.
Living with integrity doesn't mean you can't be highly competitive or make emotionally difficult decisions in a professional context. But it does mean avoiding the kind of personal debt that can detonate your life in a way that most people, unlike Musk or Altman, can't truly get away with.
Said differently, taking moral shortcuts in your career might seem to work in isolation, but doing so in all aspects of your life tends to accrue real consequences that compound over time. And most folks who take moral shortcuts aren't capable of constraining that behavior to a single domain of their life over time. It's like an infection that spreads and is hard to control. Add in any kind of latent substance use risk -- common throughout the adult US population in general -- and successful, talented people end up in the second half of their life nowhere near where their financial potential was.
it's the thing that would be easier to automate and use AI. your rationalization would apply to everything. heck the front page have a medical diagnosis slop.
the point is, seen critically, it's obvious that it's not even a replacement for a calculator. yet the hype pushes on with infinite exceptions "oh, its not the best for this that i know about, but everything else I'm not an expert I will clai AI is perfect"
I must admit that I disagree and believe that AI will only be used more as it improves. There is already a big difference between GPT-4 and GPT-5 in terms of hallucinations. If AI can do your tax accounting in 20 seconds with a 95% probability of accuracy (perhaps better than most accountants—after all, who can really understand tax legislation?) and with some clear checksums, who wouldn't use it instead of doing it themselves? In addition, AI is really excellent at inferring meaning from data (and see relations).
For most folks, filing your taxes is already mostly automated and requires a time investment of maybe 45 to 60 minutes per year. Would it be nice to reduce that down to 20 seconds? Sure, but it's not going to materially change anything in the financial life of most people. I'm all for it if it could be done reliably at scale. Outlier cases where taxation is complicated enough that it's possible to engineer substantial and meaningful financial outcomes often count more as business finance than personal finance. I'm sure artificial intelligence will indeed be more disruptive to business and corporate finance. For true personal finance, though, I suspect it may be more predatory than helpful by selling people into bad decisions that sound smart (which banks, etc., already try to do with so-called financial advisors).
Keep in mind a 5% failure rate would likely be >10 million incorrect tax filings per year solely due to AI errors, not inclusive of additional incorrect filings due to human error as well.
Better idea: the U.S. could adopt the income tax practices of most other countries, where the revenue service tells you what you owe, instead of making you guess. No need for A.I. or Intuit.
Fwiw iirc Intuit has to offer a free version of their tool with the same capabilties but it is so hidden from everybody behind so much stuff that its hard for people to reach there.
Honestly, yes there shouldn't really even be a discussion about this. US should definitely do it. I think US and India are the only two major countries still stuck on something like this and I am not sure if there are really any advantages of it.
For the 95% of people who get all their income from W2/1099 compensation, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts and who either take the standard deduction or whose only itemised deductions are dependents, mortgage interest, and SALT, there's really no need for filing tax returns at all. But the tax accounting and tax software industries lobby to prevent it.
In the current AI = LLM world, why have a language model do taxes? Why not just have AI help you adapt your non AI tax planning platform to local tax laws by reading and comprehending them at scale, a language task, instead?
Hello, please be aware that your publication history is visible on hackernews:
> Show HN: I built an AI that gives expert-backed blood test insights in seconds (bloodinsightai.com) [1]
You're free to make whatever kind of project you want, but it becomes a bit ironic when every other paragraph in this post is "unlike everyone, I did not chase the AI hype" (the whole post reads like AI prose btw).
Please also note that, while the "Loved by 2360 people" uses images hosted on d145moygdin44j.cloudfront.net, the "testimonials" section has profile pictures that link to the randomuser.me API. This could lead people to believe that the reviews are fake.
> P.s.: Noticed how when people buy the template the number on the landing page increases? Its real.
I did notice, so am I to believe that in the writing of my comment (less than an hour ago), this number jumped from 2300 to a clean 2360 (so a conversion rate of about 2 users per minute), and yet it has not received further updates since? I'm pretty sure that I've been writing for more than a few minutes already.
Also I don't think I've ever seen "inputting false profile images from randomuser.me" as a means to protect the personal infos of your client, if they don't want their name in there, I'm pretty sure they also don't want a fake name and fake image to represent them.
Finally, it's hard to believe that a thriving community of 2360 individual users would translate to a subreddit with... 5 monthly visits. https://www.reddit.com/r/WriteItDownTemplate/ (<- official subreddit listed on your site's page)
I understand you might think these people are fake but I am not here to try to prove you wrong. I know what I've built, I know how many people have signed up and requested a copy. What I will do however is fix the landing page so that less people think this is some sort of trick to get people to buy.
I have the same exact spreadsheet to track my spending. I think it's simple, effective and it just works that's why many people feel the same and use your spreadsheet instead of a mega feature-rich financial SaaS, which vibe coders think they can churn out in no time.
I've been tracking my personal finances with a simple spreadsheet (ODS, with LibreOffice) for almost a decade at this point. It's backed weekly to couple locations (not in the cloud). I add more sheets as I need them if I want more info (trends, averages, important events, etc).
Why would anyone put their personal finances on Google sheet? All that data is now tied to Google account associated with physical identity through cell phone #. Just... why?
Having bounced around several snoop-ware GUI-heavy vendor-lock-in personal finance products, I've this year been using and loving a similar product called Tiller, which absolutely convinced me that a spreadsheet is The Way for this.
Some time ago I wrote a Telegram bot that copies messages to a Google Sheet (can be personal & private). The rationale is to quickly capture data in a semi-structured format and tidy it up at a later point. Expense tracking in conjunction with this spreadsheet would be a great use-case; it can also upload pictures (for receipts) and other file attachments.
I was thinking of doing a really simple app to just capture your txs after you have paid at e.g. the grocery store. Maybe I will build it some time in the future.
I switched to self-hosted "ActualBudget" after YNAB became subscription based. The interface/workflow is extremely similar to YNAB. I also have CloudFlare tunnel set up that lets me access it from anywhere (while it runs on an SBC at home).
This is awesome! I’m already integrated into TillerHQ. Apart from price, do you have any differentiators that make it take less time for auto categorizing? Tiller doesn’t have any built in AI tools for auto categorization so I had to roll my own.
Also I’m extremely skeptical of your pricing. $5 one time seems too good to be true.
This is the essence of how we should think about building products (or, at the very least, doing some projects). I see so many of my juniors are building "useless" stuff just to participate in the AI hype. Whereas simple and elegant solutions are often neglected.
I am always fascinated by apps like these. You'd think with so many personal finance apps, Notion templates, Sheets etc out there people are finding what works for them. Still simple like these can take off.
> Build something useful. Solve a real problem. Even if it’s just a simple spreadsheet.
I think saying _just_ a simple spreadsheet makes it sound like a bad thing. Actually, the simplicity is probably one of the key selling points! I wish more things were just spreadsheets.
I made a spreadsheet that integrated with Trello so you could send SMS messages from the sheet. I actually ended up selling the Google Workspace add-on to someone.
I suggest you get rid of the obvious AI illustrations. They’re stylistically incongruent with each other and the rest of the page, perfect examples of slop which make me think the rest of the service was also LLM-generated.
“Opinions” is a weird way to put it, the typical word there is “testimonials”.
“Get Started” also doesn’t feel right to me, makes me think of a subscription service that will require lots of set up, which seems to be the opposite of what you’re going for.
As one of the top level comments say, the images are all from https://randomuser.me/ which is suspect. If you don't have a profile picture of them, then I'd suggest not using it. Or link to actual sources of feedback (Google Workspace reviews, LinkedIn posts, tweets etc)
This is honestly not better than the LLM-powered double booking system where i just record in plain text, and have the LLM convert it into journal entries. the entire thing is in plain text and backed by git+remote. Recording finances is the hardest part about tracking finances because you tend to forget/get lazy/need to track across multiple family members etc.
This is solved via LLMs that can transcribe, categorise, convert messy records into structured book keeping.
I remain unconvinced that anything more rigid is more useful.
Oh fun. Since this pokes at LLM I'll share my use case from last week. I built a similar(ish) tool locally (for personal use) as a CLI with an LLM. I download transactions from my bank and credit card, have it load them into a sqlite database, do some transformations (categorizing, grouping, excluding), and bottle up each command as a cli sub-command or flag. I used go, cobra, and the charm libs (to help with interactive labeling). I spent about a day on it to get it roughly usable, so I can drop in my updated transactions next month and get a basic report. Since the output is sqlite database and cli commands, I can also use claude code to ask it stuff, which was interesting because my original plan was to do all the asking myself and just have claude build the cli tool.
It works decently. I got out what i needed and fought very very hard to not go more all in / code dive, etc. I just needed my monthly expense totals, ordered, with some clean-up. The code is so-so, but it mostly got things working in a few shots. Claude being able to iteratively run commands / issue queries while it worked was key to it getting functional, I think. I love that it runs local and spits out plain text for tables and such; to share with my wife i copy pasted some of the output to a text document then added some comments (markdown).
If I hacked on it more, I'd probably re-work the architecture a bit; I think coming up with a good design about how to ingest idempotently, and then how you want to transform transactions (i.e. in place, vs setting up rules / overrides and then generating a computed transactions table) is most important. After each mini feature having the LLM document its usage in the README, and of course committing, was key. It made it very easy to ditch conversations and start new ones, and point to the README / examples (as opposed to compacting prior conversation).
I think your tool at $5 is a great value; I had TONS of fun making the CLI app but it still took me a few hours of focused work in the end spread over a day, and relied on me having very basic prior experience to help steer it. I bet you can charge more while still keeping the product focused / maintenance low, and absolutely think there's a strong need for it -> While I am super tempted to get crazy with my local app and / automating calculations (etc) ultimately just seeing the money in / out, a few categories that I can sum up (groceries, eating out), and the top 15 expenses, that's really all we need to get our budget in place. Kudos on building a real product, esp. on figuring out how to keep it focused, finding the niche, and recognizing the opportunity to capitalize!
And thanks for the kind words! You nailed it, it’s exactly what I wanted for people who don’t want to spend a weekend building a CLI just to track their groceries...
Hey everyone,
Lately I’ve been exploring smaller, simpler projects like this one. I usually build backend systems (currently at Browser Use, funny enough).
This spreadsheet started as a personal finance tracker during COVID and somehow turned into something people actually wanted to use.
The biggest lesson for me: People don’t care how “advanced” something is, they just want it to work and make their life easier.
Curious to hear what you all think.
Making a product flexible often makes it complex to use, complex to develop, and mediocre at everything. Makes it easy for a small product that hyper focuses on one use case to swoop in and snatch users away.
Yes! Good lesson there.
True hype created by AI is huge. Everywhere I look it's always just AI. Man we need more apps like this that just do one thing and that's it.
Ikr! I love AI, but there are too many "useless" apps that use AI just for the hype of it.
Did you purposefully write every paragraph of your intro post as an AI writing trope?
Probably! I guess that’s what happens when you spend too much time around LLMs lol.
In any case, didn't feel like it when writing haha.
Cheers for answering, was genuinely curious whether it was AI-written, you were doing it tongue in cheek, or that’s just how writing the post came naturally to you.
I do tend to write short sentences... haha. But I am def. influenced by all the LLM writing I think.
I feel the AI would've used more words? Maybe? I feel like spotting AI writing is more of a gut feeling for me these days, more so than something I can describe.
I can also feel it sometimes yeah
It really reads like a LinkedIn engagement post.
Seems reasonable for (open) self-promotion in an industry forum.
Ah no, not linkedin!
Sorry, what are you talking about? Why is his post an “AI writing trope”?
No frills. No bells. Just pure AI.
Do you know why it sounds like that?
Neither do I.
It's a feeling.
Then I don’t know this “feeling”. To me it looks like the kind of professional writing I’ve been doing for the last 20 years.
It’s bonkers that using good grammar and punctuation is now considered a bad thing on the internet.
AI is heavily trained on polished corporate marketing / memo speak. I think if you've had to write copy long enough you'll sound like that naturally.
(See LinkedIn posts from before 2020 - they're only missing the emoji basically.)
Note that this is also just how many engineering-minded people prefer to write when describing a system or tool when the goal is to sell or the audience isn't technical.
Compare with what I think a lot of us are highly used to reading, which is copy written by salespeople, or by management-minded people with sales in mind.
IMO, the way the copy is written is not like minimally-guided AI, aside from the clarity (which is the good part of AI writing). AI has a different character/tone. It tends to sound a little more like a salesperson, or a 50's PSA video.
You're most likely incorrect, the post is almost certainly written with AI. It has all the tropes.
I mean, so what?
Seriously. Is there any problem with "AI-sounding" writing? It's grammatically correct. It's readable. The only issue I can possibly think of is that you perceive AI negatively, and that you project this negativity onto everything that tangentially touches AI.
> It's grammatically correct. It's readable.
It’s overly verbose. It’s repetitive. It’s boring. It doesn’t flow right.
If people don’t want to read what you wrote about your product, they won’t use (let alone pay for) your product. Pointing out bad copy is perfectly valid and helpful criticism.
Will take this feedback! Thanks.
To be clear, I wasn’t directly criticising your post, just answering the question of the “problem with "AI-sounding" writing”.
If verbosity, repetitiveness, boring and flow are the problem, then just call those out. No need to blame it on AI. Humans don't write perfectly.
Its doing pretty well for an AI writing trope I guess.
I just wanted to share something I have built for myself and other people seem to like it!
No X. No Y. No Z. Just W.
While the world was doing Y, I was doing Z.
Everyone’s doing X. I’m quietly [ChatGPT loves that word] doing Y.
People don’t X. They Y. It’s not about Z. It’s about W, and it taught me everything/means everything to me/utterly transformed me/etc.
Do X. Do Y. Even if it’s just Z.
In red on your site: > Other Finance Apps: > Risk of sharing personal data with third parties In green: > Write-It-Down.com > Built on Google Sheets
I agree that putting your personal data into a free Google account indeed isn't a risk of sharing it with third parties. It is a guarantee.
[I have no personal involvement to this project, but I'll defend it anyway. And I am sure you knew what they meant, but still chose to write a pedantic comment]
If you use Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube etc, you already share a lot with Google; this spreadsheet is unlikely to make any different. If have managed to de-Google your life, good for you. Don't use this product either.
Other finance apps (I used to use mint.com before they shut down) require direct connections with your bank and investment accounts, generally via Plaid or Yodlee, and sometimes directly. This product avoids all that.
Now I personally don't think it's useful to me, since there are just too many expenses to keep track of, and doing it manually is too much work for me to even attempt. But privacy to Google would be pretty low on my list of concerns when using a spreadsheet.
How many expenses do you really have on a daily basis that they are too much to track? I don't like a spreadsheet for this since they have bad input UX on phones. I use a custom app I built and even though it is manual I don't really feel it since I have optimized the UX for n=1 and it just becomes a habit. I tried all these other automatic tracking apps like monarch money,mint,YNAB et al but they are just not real-time enough for me and don't keep me in touch as much, also the obvious data lock. Maybe I'll make it public someday but I haven't mostly because the common sentiment online is 'manual tracking is too much work' when it really isn't if you do it as you go vs all at once at the end of month etc.
Agreed, I’d pay for an Excel or LibreOffice Sheets version of this
I might just make one then :D
If you do, and you remember this comment, let me know :)
Care to join?
https://www.ironcalc.com
Could you please share the original post that you made that has 130k views?
Obviously if a product/idea is good enough it can go 'viral' on its own with little prodding, but I'm curious about the discussion behind that post and how it may have taken on a life of its own.
Yeah np! https://www.reddit.com/r/sheets/comments/178kf81/tracking_fi...
Getting 2k users is no small task, congrats.
Did most start using it when it was a free spreadsheet linked to a reddit post or have the 2300 users all bought the $4.99 product?
Has there been a change in take-up since you monetised it?
Most free, but a lot still buy! Surprisingly only ~50% less paid signups compared to free signups.
Wow. How did you do this? This is a saturated field, especially since the downfall of Mint. (Context: I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app. I use it myself, but have 0 users)
> I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app
Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.
Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.
Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.
One big benefit of a google sheet over a web app is that you're not relying on the creator to keep maintaining it. You can copy the sheet and then you have it forever. (Unless Google shuts down sheets, but even for Google that's unlikely.)
I have no clue. I built it for myself in 2020, then made it better each year. Once posted on Reddit... the rest is history.
I've had a similar one for like two decades, and it originated from another thing that I found around and tweaked to my liking. This spreadsheet sits nicely between the minimal effort and the uber solution of typing everything in some plain text accounting solution.
Cool!
I feel like the AI hype is big, but there are lots of us who just build normal things and who's jobs cannot allow or make use of LLMs properly.
Popular culture has always been easy to influence. We had blockchain hype, OOP hype, AI hype, Microservices hype, we had so many and they were ALL mostly a fad that resulted in yet-another-tool in the toolbelt of engineers -- nothing more, nothing less.
Good on you for using the right tools to build a new thing!
Agree! I got stuck using hype/trendy solutions to solve problems for far too long... This was proof that sometimes all it takes is a super simple solution.
LLMs are a good search replacement, but they're not task automation.
Codegen AI is great for tab-complete. It does save typing, and it is pretty smart, but you still have to have an engineer in the seat that is paying attention and knows what they're doing.
Video AI on the other hand is already disrupting Hollywood. The costs are 10,000x cheaper, the delivery time is 100,000x faster, and it's accessible with 1,000x less personnel. These are insane numbers. Multiple orders of magnitude - full step function change - across multiple dimensions at once.
You still need to have an editor and VFX person to make video AI work, and you still need to incorporate photon-on-glass footage, but it's remarkable how usable these tools are.
A small studio with five people can use AI tools to do serious work that would ordinarily take 100 people or more and require huge budgets.
This isn't just hypothesizing - I work in this industry. This is not only myself, but this is dozens of the studios I talk to and work with.
Just to cite one example, there's a studio I know that used to bid $300k on projects. You've seen their work - they do Netflix show intro sequences, pharmaceutical ads, etc. They're now bidding just $50k and winning projects left and right.
I think the biggest area of AI investment and disruption is going to be video AI.
On the videogen, one would expect small, scrappy studios to get some tools to get further on their projects. What one has observed is that it is the large behemoths that are overzealous in their use of AI tools, despite the fact that they can produce work, have the budget and expertise to make it happen.
Baffling.
The small studios have the same tools.
I think browser automation using LLMs is still huge tho (I'm biased haha)
i believe you but wow this feels so bleak
True! At the end of the day, it's a multiplier - just like many other dev hype fads e.g. Python/JavaScript poorly-typed fad of 2010s - devs who do not know what they are doing are just producing worse tech debt at a higher rate.
Same with microservices or misusing HTML to make UIs instead of documents etc.
I think consumer personal finance is hard to disrupt with AI for two reasons: (1) mistakes, hallucinations, etc., aren't acceptable; (2) there really aren't any major secret insights to derive from the data -- just spend within your means, avoid debt or use it sparingly and wisely, target high-interest loans first if you have them, maintain a sufficient emergency fund, max out tax-advantaged accounts, invest in low-fee index funds as much as you can after all of the former. There just isn't much more to it.
If you're already doing all those things, the best way you can help your personal finances is to make good decisions and work hard and with integrity in other areas of your life: grow your career and income, position yourself smartly to lower your odds of layoffs / termination / etc., take care of your health to avoid health-related income disruptions and costs (this includes mental health!), and make smart relationship choices (i.e., don't end up in divorce).
Personal finance is pretty much a solved problem. Breakthrough results generally come from personal and moral discipline sustained consistently over a long period of time. Simple tools like this can help a lot -- I like it.
Being able to weigh the benefits of different places to put money is important too. I had an ex who was big on Ramsey and really wanted to pay down our 1.8% rate mortgage and put "rainy day" money into a savings account that also yielded 1-2%.
I argued that the the first priority should be maintaining a consistent $5k in the main chequing account and calling that the the rainy day money, since doing so would cause us to have a $20/mo service fee waived and we'd avoid the semi-regular NSF feeds we were getting dinged with from preauth utility bill debits.
Monthly interest of 2% on $5k is only about $8 a month; our interest rate would have needed to be 5%+ before it was worth it earning that before first getting the account fee cleared (or, of course, just switching to a bank that offered fee-free chequing accounts).
Untrue - there isn't a personal finance solution that doesn't have mistakes. Not one. I've literally tried them all. Its mostly because the syncing with accounts is very very brittle and a lot of things like stock plans etc aren't supported well so your daily view will always be somewhat off.
There are insights to derive from the data - like how much do you really spend. But again its really hard to get there because the numbers are always off and most people don't actually want to know.
You are severely underestimating the average person's agency with their money.
I wanted to sync accounts some time ago and decided to not do it at all. I lost all track of where what is, how I managed to spend etc.
Writing it down yourself is still the best option for me at this point. I feel on top of things.
I use an app but I also have an excel sheet where I track everything very carefully every week or so.
Trust my excel sheet much much more.
Honestly for everyone I know this is how they do it. There is one guy who built his own app and his is perfect because he has solved for his specific bank accounts.
He knows every $ coming in and going out - its pretty impressive.
Thats awesome!
> hard to disrupt with AI for two reasons: (1) mistakes, hallucinations, etc., aren't acceptable
I think AI hallucination rate is already below my own hallucination rate, especially in a boring/unknown domain
I don't know how much you can trust this though, given that you might not be able to catch hallucinations exactly in those boring/unknown domains.
You can forgive your own mistakes, but you'll have zero tolerance for a bot making mistakes with your money / on your behalf.
I prefer to also just write it down myself (at least for now)
And yet only one is unacceptable for humans reviewing their own expenditures.
I think the lack of friction AI has is a real problem.
AI models output is always overly confident. And when you correct them they will almost always come up with something like "Ah, you're totally right" and switch around the output (unless there are safeguards / deep research involved).
AI doesn't push back, therefore you more often than not don't second guess your own thoughts. This is, in essence, the most valuable tool in discussions with other humans.
I also dont trust an LLM with my finances. At least not for now
There are some databases with spending habits, so you can compare your spending to folks with similar households, and some prudent guidelines. But it's not rocket science and a bit silly. You don't really need to remind sneakerheads they spend more than average on shoes, or pennypinchers that they spend (too?) little.
For most people just keeping tabs of spending helps them reign it in. Setting up auto savings and pension contributions also helps. The next step is using cash to pay for discretionary spending - not more automation.
I'd really like an AI tool with absolute security I can trust to trawl through my emails and reconcile invoices against my bank records.
So I’m doing something like this for a legal case I am dealing with for giggles. AI is absolutely giving me bogus answers that I have to fact check. Not sure I would trust it to reconcile items.
I'd never trust it
Do you have to trust it? Have the AI built a list of all the invoices it can find in your email then a separate application reconciles that against your statements. The AI might miss something or invent something, but the mismatch list you get back should be short.
It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe it would be better than having to do it all manually.
> and with integrity
Good advice except for this. In today’s society you’ll lose 10/10 times to somebody who’s working hard and doesn’t have any integrity. See Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.
There are always outlier examples, but for most folks, sacrificing integrity too much will come back to bite them -- marital and family problems, divorce, or personal crises that end up eating through money or having ramifications that affect your career performance are the most common examples.
Living with integrity doesn't mean you can't be highly competitive or make emotionally difficult decisions in a professional context. But it does mean avoiding the kind of personal debt that can detonate your life in a way that most people, unlike Musk or Altman, can't truly get away with.
Said differently, taking moral shortcuts in your career might seem to work in isolation, but doing so in all aspects of your life tends to accrue real consequences that compound over time. And most folks who take moral shortcuts aren't capable of constraining that behavior to a single domain of their life over time. It's like an infection that spreads and is hard to control. Add in any kind of latent substance use risk -- common throughout the adult US population in general -- and successful, talented people end up in the second half of their life nowhere near where their financial potential was.
it's the thing that would be easier to automate and use AI. your rationalization would apply to everything. heck the front page have a medical diagnosis slop.
the point is, seen critically, it's obvious that it's not even a replacement for a calculator. yet the hype pushes on with infinite exceptions "oh, its not the best for this that i know about, but everything else I'm not an expert I will clai AI is perfect"
I must admit that I disagree and believe that AI will only be used more as it improves. There is already a big difference between GPT-4 and GPT-5 in terms of hallucinations. If AI can do your tax accounting in 20 seconds with a 95% probability of accuracy (perhaps better than most accountants—after all, who can really understand tax legislation?) and with some clear checksums, who wouldn't use it instead of doing it themselves? In addition, AI is really excellent at inferring meaning from data (and see relations).
For most folks, filing your taxes is already mostly automated and requires a time investment of maybe 45 to 60 minutes per year. Would it be nice to reduce that down to 20 seconds? Sure, but it's not going to materially change anything in the financial life of most people. I'm all for it if it could be done reliably at scale. Outlier cases where taxation is complicated enough that it's possible to engineer substantial and meaningful financial outcomes often count more as business finance than personal finance. I'm sure artificial intelligence will indeed be more disruptive to business and corporate finance. For true personal finance, though, I suspect it may be more predatory than helpful by selling people into bad decisions that sound smart (which banks, etc., already try to do with so-called financial advisors).
Keep in mind a 5% failure rate would likely be >10 million incorrect tax filings per year solely due to AI errors, not inclusive of additional incorrect filings due to human error as well.
Better idea: the U.S. could adopt the income tax practices of most other countries, where the revenue service tells you what you owe, instead of making you guess. No need for A.I. or Intuit.
Fwiw iirc Intuit has to offer a free version of their tool with the same capabilties but it is so hidden from everybody behind so much stuff that its hard for people to reach there.
Honestly, yes there shouldn't really even be a discussion about this. US should definitely do it. I think US and India are the only two major countries still stuck on something like this and I am not sure if there are really any advantages of it.
They will tell you how much you owe, but only if you file incorrectly :P
For Americans, if you didn't know, you can check your IRS transcripts at https://www.irs.gov/ to see exactly how much the IRS thinks you've earned.
Thank you, I didn't know about this and it's great information to have for reference!
That doesn't arbitrarily increase GDP through revenue-through-friction, though.
> perhaps
That perhaps is doing a lot of lifting.
Not really. After using GPT-5 extensively I'd easily trust it to do my taxes. I find the output to be very reliable, also my taxes are trivial.
I'm currently doing that. One problem is that it's interpretation of the tax law and instructions are not consistent. My taxes are not trivial.
> I'd easily trust it to do my taxes. I find the output to be very reliable, also my taxes are trivial.
Tax season in the US is in about six months - I look forward to hearing how your experiment goes!
For the 95% of people who get all their income from W2/1099 compensation, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts and who either take the standard deduction or whose only itemised deductions are dependents, mortgage interest, and SALT, there's really no need for filing tax returns at all. But the tax accounting and tax software industries lobby to prevent it.
In the current AI = LLM world, why have a language model do taxes? Why not just have AI help you adapt your non AI tax planning platform to local tax laws by reading and comprehending them at scale, a language task, instead?
5% odds of screwing up my taxes and going to jail through no fault of my own is a horrible proposition.
This is exactly how YNAB started. https://www.ynab.com/about-us/timeline
And now at unexplainable 109usd/year. I really wish there would be a cheaper solution with the same mechanics.
So cool!
Hello, please be aware that your publication history is visible on hackernews:
> Show HN: I built an AI that gives expert-backed blood test insights in seconds (bloodinsightai.com) [1]
You're free to make whatever kind of project you want, but it becomes a bit ironic when every other paragraph in this post is "unlike everyone, I did not chase the AI hype" (the whole post reads like AI prose btw).
Please also note that, while the "Loved by 2360 people" uses images hosted on d145moygdin44j.cloudfront.net, the "testimonials" section has profile pictures that link to the randomuser.me API. This could lead people to believe that the reviews are fake.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43380749
I tried a lot of things, I even work with AI professionally.
This is just a side project I had since 5 years ago. And it just reminded me how simple things can be sometimes. No need to put AI everywhere.
In any case, the reviews are not fake, I talked to these people personally in search for feedback. I am not going to share their personal info ofc.
But will consider improving the site to not make it feel fake!
Last line before you edited your reply was:
> P.s.: Noticed how when people buy the template the number on the landing page increases? Its real.
I did notice, so am I to believe that in the writing of my comment (less than an hour ago), this number jumped from 2300 to a clean 2360 (so a conversion rate of about 2 users per minute), and yet it has not received further updates since? I'm pretty sure that I've been writing for more than a few minutes already.
Also I don't think I've ever seen "inputting false profile images from randomuser.me" as a means to protect the personal infos of your client, if they don't want their name in there, I'm pretty sure they also don't want a fake name and fake image to represent them.
Finally, it's hard to believe that a thriving community of 2360 individual users would translate to a subreddit with... 5 monthly visits. https://www.reddit.com/r/WriteItDownTemplate/ (<- official subreddit listed on your site's page)
You are right, I did edit the comment since after I read it again I found it too defensive, so I rephrased it a little. Hope you don't mind!
The reddit page you posted was made quite some time after the initial post that went "viral" (https://www.reddit.com/r/sheets/comments/178kf81/tracking_fi...). I also haven't put much effort in growing it, sadly.
I understand you might think these people are fake but I am not here to try to prove you wrong. I know what I've built, I know how many people have signed up and requested a copy. What I will do however is fix the landing page so that less people think this is some sort of trick to get people to buy.
In any case, I really do appreciate the feedback!
>P.s.: Noticed how when people buy the template the number on the landing page increases? Its real.
Huh? You mean that hardcoded text?
<span class="font-bold text-customOrange">2360</span>
If you inspect a page you will likely not see that there is some JS logic in the background that polls from a DB.
But will try to make it more convincing!
He/she raised valid points respectfully, no need for this snarky tone.
I have the same exact spreadsheet to track my spending. I think it's simple, effective and it just works that's why many people feel the same and use your spreadsheet instead of a mega feature-rich financial SaaS, which vibe coders think they can churn out in no time.
I like how many people just use a spreadsheet!
I've been tracking my personal finances with a simple spreadsheet (ODS, with LibreOffice) for almost a decade at this point. It's backed weekly to couple locations (not in the cloud). I add more sheets as I need them if I want more info (trends, averages, important events, etc). Why would anyone put their personal finances on Google sheet? All that data is now tied to Google account associated with physical identity through cell phone #. Just... why?
Having bounced around several snoop-ware GUI-heavy vendor-lock-in personal finance products, I've this year been using and loving a similar product called Tiller, which absolutely convinced me that a spreadsheet is The Way for this.
Microsoft money 2007 was the last great finance program to exist.
Monarch comes close
If there were a standardized way to pull your own data from banks, we wouldn’t need to use snoopware, vendor locked apps.
Yea I know Tiller but I think this one is much better because it saves you a lot more money
Its also simpler I believe
I only know spreadsheet atm haha
Some time ago I wrote a Telegram bot that copies messages to a Google Sheet (can be personal & private). The rationale is to quickly capture data in a semi-structured format and tidy it up at a later point. Expense tracking in conjunction with this spreadsheet would be a great use-case; it can also upload pictures (for receipts) and other file attachments.
https://t.me/gsheet_notes_bot
I was thinking of doing a really simple app to just capture your txs after you have paid at e.g. the grocery store. Maybe I will build it some time in the future.
A TG bot also seems interesting ngl
I switched to self-hosted "ActualBudget" after YNAB became subscription based. The interface/workflow is extremely similar to YNAB. I also have CloudFlare tunnel set up that lets me access it from anywhere (while it runs on an SBC at home).
https://actualbudget.org/
I wouldn't say it "took off", but at least two people use the spreadsheet I built.
I made a video rebuilding it from scratch, for those who like to nerd out about these things: https://youtu.be/H5Xqwlwew98
The sheet has been filled out and evolved for my use since 2011.
This is awesome! I’m already integrated into TillerHQ. Apart from price, do you have any differentiators that make it take less time for auto categorizing? Tiller doesn’t have any built in AI tools for auto categorization so I had to roll my own.
Also I’m extremely skeptical of your pricing. $5 one time seems too good to be true.
>$5 one time seems too good to be true.
OP isn't hosting anything and has 0 costs apart from domain registration and website hosting.
You can check how it works in the demo. Idk, charging more than $5 for a google sheet like this felt wrong.
Why is it too good to be true? It's just a premade spreadsheet.
It's just a premade spreadsheet indeed.
> Build something useful. Solve a real problem.
This is the essence of how we should think about building products (or, at the very least, doing some projects). I see so many of my juniors are building "useless" stuff just to participate in the AI hype. Whereas simple and elegant solutions are often neglected.
> simple and elegant solutions Exactly!
Small typo in the first paragraph:
"Strart" should probably be "Start" unless it's ragebait to gain engagement.
Nice catch! Its not ragebait haha.
Congratulations on the milestone!
The three small videos with the big cursor are excellent. What did you use to edit them like that?
Thanks! Screen studio I believe.
I am always fascinated by apps like these. You'd think with so many personal finance apps, Notion templates, Sheets etc out there people are finding what works for them. Still simple like these can take off.
Man I was also surprised haha
> Build something useful. Solve a real problem. Even if it’s just a simple spreadsheet.
I think saying _just_ a simple spreadsheet makes it sound like a bad thing. Actually, the simplicity is probably one of the key selling points! I wish more things were just spreadsheets.
I made a spreadsheet that integrated with Trello so you could send SMS messages from the sheet. I actually ended up selling the Google Workspace add-on to someone.
I think we should bring back this trend of making simple things
I love spreadsheets haha
Google Docs and Sheets are still a great way to store data, and this ongoing AI boom will make many people rich while also bringing societal benefits.
Finding such opportunities and making them sustainably profitable is truly great.
I still prefer Google Sheets somehow... Let's see how many people think the same
I suggest you get rid of the obvious AI illustrations. They’re stylistically incongruent with each other and the rest of the page, perfect examples of slop which make me think the rest of the service was also LLM-generated.
“Opinions” is a weird way to put it, the typical word there is “testimonials”.
“Get Started” also doesn’t feel right to me, makes me think of a subscription service that will require lots of set up, which seems to be the opposite of what you’re going for.
The testimonials on the landing page, where are they sourced from?
People actually getting back to me via different sources (linkedin, whatsapp etc)
it's AI generated
Whatever you say I guess.
As one of the top level comments say, the images are all from https://randomuser.me/ which is suspect. If you don't have a profile picture of them, then I'd suggest not using it. Or link to actual sources of feedback (Google Workspace reviews, LinkedIn posts, tweets etc)
first you said you made it, then you blame your developer friend, now you say whatever? sure bud
Feels like a LinkedIn influencer wrote this.
Oof haha. My bad.
Congrats on your success. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that are needed the most.
Thanks!
I will never us it if I have to pay. Its not clear what this gets me over any other spreadsheet .
Some people find value in it, but if you don't thats fine!
Nice. I've been looking for a decent budget spreadsheet for a while. Great price.
Hope you like it!
Congrats!
Why does the page always scroll to the top when focused/changing tabs back to it? :(
Unsure, will check!
Congratulations on making the life of ~2k people a bit better.
Appreciate it! It's not much, but its honest work.
That's why every app should be. to make peoples life easier
Exactly
Very cool. What did you see to do the screen recordings?
Screen studio
c'mon I'm all for the hustle but put a bit more effore to be creative. all your website reviews are AI generated 5 star slop
I actually paid a friend to build it who is just getting into software :D He wanted a starter project and needed some money to attend a conference.
But will give him feedback!
This is honestly not better than the LLM-powered double booking system where i just record in plain text, and have the LLM convert it into journal entries. the entire thing is in plain text and backed by git+remote. Recording finances is the hardest part about tracking finances because you tend to forget/get lazy/need to track across multiple family members etc.
This is solved via LLMs that can transcribe, categorise, convert messy records into structured book keeping.
I remain unconvinced that anything more rigid is more useful.
Everyone has their own way of solving their problem. Still a lot of people like spreadsheets more I guess.
Oh fun. Since this pokes at LLM I'll share my use case from last week. I built a similar(ish) tool locally (for personal use) as a CLI with an LLM. I download transactions from my bank and credit card, have it load them into a sqlite database, do some transformations (categorizing, grouping, excluding), and bottle up each command as a cli sub-command or flag. I used go, cobra, and the charm libs (to help with interactive labeling). I spent about a day on it to get it roughly usable, so I can drop in my updated transactions next month and get a basic report. Since the output is sqlite database and cli commands, I can also use claude code to ask it stuff, which was interesting because my original plan was to do all the asking myself and just have claude build the cli tool.
It works decently. I got out what i needed and fought very very hard to not go more all in / code dive, etc. I just needed my monthly expense totals, ordered, with some clean-up. The code is so-so, but it mostly got things working in a few shots. Claude being able to iteratively run commands / issue queries while it worked was key to it getting functional, I think. I love that it runs local and spits out plain text for tables and such; to share with my wife i copy pasted some of the output to a text document then added some comments (markdown).
If I hacked on it more, I'd probably re-work the architecture a bit; I think coming up with a good design about how to ingest idempotently, and then how you want to transform transactions (i.e. in place, vs setting up rules / overrides and then generating a computed transactions table) is most important. After each mini feature having the LLM document its usage in the README, and of course committing, was key. It made it very easy to ditch conversations and start new ones, and point to the README / examples (as opposed to compacting prior conversation).
I think your tool at $5 is a great value; I had TONS of fun making the CLI app but it still took me a few hours of focused work in the end spread over a day, and relied on me having very basic prior experience to help steer it. I bet you can charge more while still keeping the product focused / maintenance low, and absolutely think there's a strong need for it -> While I am super tempted to get crazy with my local app and / automating calculations (etc) ultimately just seeing the money in / out, a few categories that I can sum up (groceries, eating out), and the top 15 expenses, that's really all we need to get our budget in place. Kudos on building a real product, esp. on figuring out how to keep it focused, finding the niche, and recognizing the opportunity to capitalize!
EDIT: My actual deps list here.
Wow, this is awesome! Love the setup.
And thanks for the kind words! You nailed it, it’s exactly what I wanted for people who don’t want to spend a weekend building a CLI just to track their groceries...
Sometimes a simple spreadsheet does the job!
It's possible to do the same with google sheets using GOOGLEFINANCE function and I have been using it to track and manage finances since years.
I was thinking about making a sheet for this, yes. I might actual revise and upgrade this version to include it!
Actually, having AI to do this kind of schlep work of analyzing my spending is something I’m really looking forward to.
Yeah, I guess I just enjoy writing it down myself since I really get a good feeling where I spend my money.
If I let it be automatic, I quickly lose grip.
Maybe we are making something like this soon
Nice G
Thanks! haha
make it 2301
Hehe, its a few more now actually.
> Built on Google Sheets you own your data
What?
/s
Haha, I mean... You don't have to share your data with a random AI startup. Its in your google drive.
Ofc you can always put it on a sheet of paper :P Thats the OG method.
You're just sharing it with an established AI megacorp :)
(I thought they used free google drive accounts to train Gemini, but I can't find where I saw that now. Does anyone have a reference?)
hahaha, You know nothing John Snow
haha
fixed