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Show HN: I built the simple expense tracker I wanted to use
Hi HN! I built Spenso because I wanted a simple record of my spending, but never kept up with budgeting apps.
I wanted to type or dictate something like "Starbucks 25" or "Uber Eats 25, Lidl 54.30 yesterday" and call it a day. Spenso understands the message, logs each expense, and automatically categorizes it.
It’s built for iPhone, works offline-first, and uses AI only when an entry can’t be categorized on-device.
I’d love honest feedback from anyone who has tried and abandoned expense trackers before.
- ventana 3mo agoAs much as I want to support development of useful tools, I cannot see why I would use anyone else's expense tracker and pay for it, when making my own, which does everything I need the way I need it, is so easy now. Speaking of expense trackers, it's probably something similar to to-do lists: there are tons of them, and they all just don't feel right, so of course I made my own a few years ago (pre-LLM). I was procrastinating for a few years and never made it into a real product, and then Claude and Codex made me stop even thinking about it, because why bother.
- bitkidd 3mo agoThat’s fair. Spenso probably isn’t for people who can build their own tracker exactly how they want it. I made it because I wanted something really quick to use, and thought other people might want that too without building it themselves. What did your own tracker do better than the apps you tried?
- ventana 3mo agoI self-host the backend and the database, so I can have a web interface and file expenses from my laptop, not only from my phone.
- backendnull 2mo agohow do you sync the offline data. are you using IndexedDB alone?