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I think bots are a great way of automating your life in fun ways. It's also my new favorite project to suggest to people starting to program, because just a lit
by JZL003 4y ago
I think bots are a great way of automating your life in fun ways. It's also my new favorite project to suggest to people starting to program, because just a little bit of customizability goes a long way
Tracking mood is great. A simple telegram bot -> a google sheet lets telegram do the mobile/desktop UI and you just control the logic
One overlooked thing is automating financial tracking/categorization. In the US there's no good cross banking api except for email. Almost every credit card, bank, etc can email a receipt (set the minimum amount of alerts to be $0.01). The flowchart for parsing is bank alert -> gmail -> gmail filter by from address adds a label -> google pub sub notices that label and pings a little VPS somewhere -> gmail api -> parse email -> telegram bot
As I type, it sounds complicated but each step is well trod and has tutorials available. Now you have the ability to make custom push notifications for any transaction with < 1 second latency, instead of using the bank app. And it's all under your control. So the telegram bot allows you to categorize those purchases, you can add little notes or put it in categories. The nice thing is instead of looking at the end of the month and having 100+ little purchases and trying to remember if you ate at Starbucks 4 weeks ago, you categorize things as they happen in just a few clicks. And adding a category (one click) at the time implicitly marks the purchase as 'known good', not a suspicious purchase. So you can cross check at the end of the month for purchases you didn't categorize as suspicious.
- JZL003 4y agoIf you own the server, it might be easier to set up a little smtp client. Or to be more security conscious, a incoming only smtp client like https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher/ https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher/ and collapse that dataflow. But pubsub has a monstrous free tier anyway and I also wanted to keep a copy of the emails on gmail which is easier to search
- cesnja 4y agoToshl is a finance tracker (and much more) with bank integrations. I don't use it, but I guess you could outsorce this type of work to the app. https://toshl.com/bank-connections/ https://toshl.com/bank-connections/
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoHow is this different from mint.com for transaction tracking?
- skinnymuch 4y agoToshl seems like any other modern finance tracker. The bank integrations are Plaid it seems, Which doesn’t cover everything.
- Beat-O 4y agoIt's Plaid in the US mostly, but other providers are used around the world as well. For example Salt Edge, with much wider coverage.
- skinnymuch 4y agoRight that makes sense. It’s not a big deal. An app I was using MoneyWiz, let you switch between providers so something like Venmo or crappy store branded credit cards were able to be included too via Yodlee. I dont do much crypto, but Salt Edge does help there.
- realjhondoe 4y ago+1 for the Telegram bot, I've been thinking on doing a custom app that asks me for my mood but the Telegram bot is a better idea!