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Show HN: Write It Down – Personal finance tracker
Everyone’s chasing AI hype.
I built a Google Sheet and it quietly took off.
In 2020, I made it to track my own finances for income, expenses, savings, yearly summaries etc. I shared it once on Reddit, forgot about it for a year… When I checked back, it had over 130k views and I was honestly stoked!
No launch. No funding. No AI.
Just a spreadsheet people actually stick with and find useful.
I finally gave it a proper home: write-it-down.com
Now, more than 2,300 people use it.
It’s intentionally boring and that’s why it works.
People don’t always need AI. They just need something that actually solves their problem.
This isn’t a billion-dollar startup of course, but it taught me more about building products than almost anything else.
Build something useful.
Solve a real problem.
Even if it’s just a simple spreadsheet.
So, what’s the most “boring” thing you’ve built that found unexpected traction?
- LarsenCC 1y agoHey 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.
- zeroCalories 1y agoMaking 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoYes! Good lesson there.
- backendWizard 1y agoNice G
- LarsenCC 1y agoThanks! haha
- product-hunt 1y agoTrue 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoIkr! I love AI, but there are too many "useless" apps that use AI just for the hype of it.
- lionkor 1y agoI 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!
- LarsenCC 1y agoAgree! 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.
- dude250711 1y agoTrue! 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.
- echelon 1y agoLLMs 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.
- fedeb95 1y agoCongratulations on making the life of ~2k people a bit better.
- LarsenCC 1y agoAppreciate it! It's not much, but its honest work.
- product-hunt 1y agoThat's why every app should be. to make peoples life easier
- fedeb95 1y agoExactly
- slig 1y agoCongratulations on the milestone! The three small videos with the big cursor are excellent. What did you use to edit them like that?
- LarsenCC 1y agoThanks! Screen studio I believe.
- Qision 1y ago> Built on Google Sheets you own your data What? /s
- marciobarroso 1y agohahaha, You know nothing John Snow
- LarsenCC 1y agohaha
- LarsenCC 1y agoHaha, 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.
- hoistbypetard 1y agoYou'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?)
- product-hunt 1y agofixed
- nilkn 1y agoI 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.
- 1oooqooq 1y agoit'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"
- l5870uoo9y 1y agoI 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).
- beardedwizard 1y ago
- BostonFern 1y agoThe testimonials on the landing page, where are they sourced from?
- LarsenCC 1y agoPeople actually getting back to me via different sources (linkedin, whatsapp etc)
- didntknowyou 1y agoit's AI generated
- LarsenCC 1y agoWhatever you say I guess.
- giarc 1y agoAs one of the top level comments say, the images are all from https://randomuser.me/ 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)
- didntknowyou 1y agofirst you said you made it, then you blame your developer friend, now you say whatever? sure bud
- gyomu 1y agoDid you purposefully write every paragraph of your intro post as an AI writing trope?
- jnovek 1y agoSorry, what are you talking about? Why is his post an “AI writing trope”?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aswegs8 1y agoNo frills. No bells. Just pure AI. Do you know why it sounds like that? Neither do I. It's a feeling.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoI 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.
- latexr 1y ago> 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.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoIf 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.
- kruffalon 1y agoSmall typo in the first paragraph: "Strart" should probably be "Start" unless it's ragebait to gain engagement.
- LarsenCC 1y agoNice catch! Its not ragebait haha.
- 4ndr3vv 1y agoGetting 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?
- LarsenCC 1y agoMost free, but a lot still buy! Surprisingly only ~50% less paid signups compared to free signups.
- artursapek 1y agoActually, having AI to do this kind of schlep work of analyzing my spending is something I’m really looking forward to.
- LarsenCC 1y agoYeah, 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.
- product-hunt 1y agoMaybe we are making something like this soon
- the__alchemist 1y agoWow. 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)
- LarsenCC 1y agoI have no clue. I built it for myself in 2020, then made it better each year. Once posted on Reddit... the rest is history.
- pantulis 1y agoI'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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoCool!
- sras-me 1y ago> 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.
- tempestn 1y agoOne 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.)
- danieltanfh95 1y agoThis 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoEveryone has their own way of solving their problem. Still a lot of people like spreadsheets more I guess.
- aswegs8 1y agomake it 2301
- LarsenCC 1y agoHehe, its a few more now actually.
- didntknowyou 1y agoc'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
- LarsenCC 1y agoI 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!
- fhennig 1y ago> 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoI love spreadsheets haha
- product-hunt 1y agoI think we should bring back this trend of making simple things
- giarc 1y agoI 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.
- lain98 1y agoIt'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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoI was thinking about making a sheet for this, yes. I might actual revise and upgrade this version to include it!
- fersarr 1y agoVery cool. What did you see to do the screen recordings?
- LarsenCC 1y agoScreen studio
- sneilan1 1y agoThis 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.
- hersko 1y agoWhy is it too good to be true? It's just a premade spreadsheet.
- LarsenCC 1y agoIt's just a premade spreadsheet indeed.
- giarc 1y ago>$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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoYou can check how it works in the demo. Idk, charging more than $5 for a google sheet like this felt wrong.
- doctorhandshake 1y agoHaving 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.
- grepfru_it 1y agoMicrosoft 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoI only know spreadsheet atm haha
- product-hunt 1y agoYea I know Tiller but I think this one is much better because it saves you a lot more money
- LarsenCC 1y agoIts also simpler I believe
- latexr 1y agoI 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.
- shibaprasadb 1y ago> 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.
- LarsenCC 1y ago> simple and elegant solutions Exactly!
- jaffa2 1y agoI will never us it if I have to pay. Its not clear what this gets me over any other spreadsheet .
- LarsenCC 1y agoSome people find value in it, but if you don't thats fine!
- brandall10 1y agoCould 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoYeah np! https://www.reddit.com/r/sheets/comments/178kf81/tracking_finances_using_google_sheets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sheets/comments/178kf81/tracking_fi...
- XCSme 1y agoCongrats! Why does the page always scroll to the top when focused/changing tabs back to it? :(
- LarsenCC 1y agoUnsure, will check!
- rimmontrieu 1y agoI 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoI like how many people just use a spreadsheet!
- ch_fr 1y agoHello, 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43380749
- LarsenCC 1y agoI 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!
- zsoltkacsandi 1y agoHe/she raised valid points respectfully, no need for this snarky tone.
- giarc 1y ago>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>
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- LarsenCC 1y agoIf 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!
- R_Spaghetti 1y agoIn 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.
- summermusic 1y agoAgreed, I’d pay for an Excel or LibreOffice Sheets version of this
- LarsenCC 1y agoI might just make one then :D
- nhatcher 1y agoCare to join? https://www.ironcalc.com https://www.ironcalc.com
- summermusic 1y agoIf you do, and you remember this comment, let me know :)
- tsycho 1y ago[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.
- cloverich 1y agoOh 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. require ( github.com/BurntSushi/toml v1.5.0 github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles v0.21.0 github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea v1.3.5 github.com/charmbracelet/huh v0.7.0 github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss v1.1.0 github.com/charmbracelet/log v0.4.2 github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 v1.14.22 github.com/spf13/cobra v1.10.1 )
- mfro 1y agoNice. I've been looking for a decent budget spreadsheet for a while. Great price.
- LarsenCC 1y agoHope you like it!
- dvcoolarun 1y agoGoogle 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoI still prefer Google Sheets somehow... Let's see how many people think the same
- betorolla 1y agoCongrats on your success. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that are needed the most.
- LarsenCC 1y agoThanks!
- callamdelaney 1y agoFeels like a LinkedIn influencer wrote this.
- LarsenCC 1y agoOof haha. My bad.
- blackbear_ 1y agoSome 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 https://t.me/gsheet_notes_bot
- LarsenCC 1y agoI 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
- oidar 1y agoThis is exactly how YNAB started. https://www.ynab.com/about-us/timeline https://www.ynab.com/about-us/timeline
- thomashabets2 1y agoI 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 https://youtu.be/H5Xqwlwew98 The sheet has been filled out and evolved for my use since 2011.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DarmokJalad1701 1y agoI 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/ https://actualbudget.org/
- thisisit 1y agoI 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.
- LarsenCC 1y agoMan I was also surprised haha
- drillsteps5 1y agoI'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?