Budget App — Personal Finance Tracker with AI

Everything you need to take control of your money

Built as a full-stack desktop app with a React frontend, FastAPI backend, and SQLite database — all running locally on your Mac.

AI-Powered Categorization

3-tier engine: amount rules catch exact matches, merchant mappings learn from your reviews, and Claude AI handles everything else. Your categories get smarter over time.

Bank Syncing via Plaid

Connect your bank accounts and credit cards with Plaid. Transactions sync automatically every 4 hours with cursor-based incremental updates — no duplicate imports.

Spending Analytics

Interactive charts show monthly spending by category, cash flow trends, and drill-down transaction details. See exactly where your money goes with sparkline trends.

Budget Tracking

Set monthly budget targets per category and track progress with color-coded progress bars. Green when on track, yellow as you approach, red when over budget.

Investment Portfolio

Track your investment holdings with live price updates via yfinance. View performance charts, asset allocation, and transaction history across all brokerage accounts.

Financial Insights Chat

Chat with Claude about your finances. Get personalized analysis of spending patterns, savings opportunities, and actionable recommendations with streaming responses.

Privacy First

Your data never leaves your machine. The SQLite database lives in ~/BudgetApp, Plaid tokens are Fernet-encrypted at rest, and there's no cloud backend or telemetry.

Recurring Monitor

Monthly grid tracking every subscription and recurring charge. See at a glance which services you're paying for, spot price increases, and identify forgotten subscriptions.

See it in action

A dark-themed, native desktop experience built with Electron.

Review Queue

Categorize incoming transactions with AI predictions, batch selection, and two-phase commit.

Spending Analysis

Monthly breakdowns with bar charts, pie charts, and drill-down transaction lists.

Cash Flow

Biweekly income vs. expenses with area charts and top spending/income drivers.

Investment Portfolio

Holdings, performance charts, allocation breakdown, and live price tracking.

AI Insights

Chat with Claude about your finances. Streaming analysis with follow-up questions.

Accounts

Manage bank connections, sync status, balances, and CSV imports.

How the categorization engine works

A 3-tier priority cascade that learns from every review. The more you use it, the less you need to.

1

Amount Rules

Exact amount matching for merchants like Apple and Venmo that charge different amounts for different services. $15.89 from APPLE.COM/BILL always maps to HBO Max.

Auto-confirmed Confidence: 1.0

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2

Merchant Mappings

Regex pattern matching against 200+ known merchants, ordered by confidence. Confidence increases each time you confirm — reaching auto-confirm threshold at 3+.

Auto or Review 50+ seed patterns

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3

Claude AI

For unknown merchants, Claude Haiku categorizes using few-shot examples from your recent confirmed transactions. AI predictions always go to the review queue.

Pending review Few-shot learning