Building personal apps
I built a spend tracking app for myself as a side project - and I am really excited for what this new era of software development will mean for building "personal apps".
Understanding my finances have been a perpetual challenge. There are several apps out there, and none of them have worked for me.
For the last 5 years, I have tracked my investments on a Google Sheet and I update it every couple of months. This works for me since I do mostly passive investments and the ritual shows me the progress and helps me make decisions.
Spends, though, are a different story.
Thankfully, I am not a big spender by nature, so I am not extremely concerned about overspending and budgeting. However, the Data guy in me does want to keep a track of things with a dashboard.
The problem is, there is only one source for the complete data: Emails.
Email is one place where all the bills and alerts get aggregated.
There are apps like Cred and FoldMoney, which are built to do this tracking. But, I do not want to give them Read access to all my emails.
Email is one of my primary digital assets and I would like to avoid giving full access to anybody.
So I decided to build my own using Claude Code.
- I setup a rule on my inbox to Label all transaction emails
- The app syncs the emails and parses them
- There is a dashboard which shows a nice categorized view of my spends
- The app is hosted by me, and the data is stored in an database I control
This was done over a few days of on-and-off prompting. It's a simple app for now, but I plan to keep adding more features to make things easier for myself.
I have open sourced the code here, there are instructions to set it up for yourself as well.
Have you been building anything for yourself? Would love to hear it!
PS: Though this was "vibe-coded" my experience of "hand-coding" apps in my previous jobs was important to make sure that I was not building something which would ruin my life. So please ensure you know what you are doing before you give these agents access to critical apps or data. I will be glad to help, if you have questions!