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Show HN: Write It Down – Personal finance tracker

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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?

Hey 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.

5 days agoby LarsenCC

True 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.

5 days agoby product-hunt

Did you purposefully write every paragraph of your intro post as an AI writing trope?

5 days agoby gyomu

In 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.

5 days agoby R_Spaghetti

Could 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.

5 days agoby brandall10

Getting 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?

5 days agoby 4ndr3vv

Wow. 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)

5 days agoby the__alchemist

I 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!

5 days agoby lionkor

I 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.

5 days agoby nilkn

This is exactly how YNAB started. https://www.ynab.com/about-us/timeline

5 days agoby oidar

Hello, 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

5 days agoby ch_fr

I 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.

5 days agoby rimmontrieu

Having 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.

5 days agoby doctorhandshake

I'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?

5 days agoby drillsteps5

Some 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

5 days agoby blackbear_

I 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/

5 days agoby DarmokJalad1701

I 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

The sheet has been filled out and evolved for my use since 2011.

5 days agoby thomashabets2

Small typo in the first paragraph:

"Strart" should probably be "Start" unless it's ragebait to gain engagement.

5 days agoby kruffalon

This 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.

5 days agoby sneilan1

> 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.

5 days agoby shibaprasadb

Congratulations on the milestone!

The three small videos with the big cursor are excellent. What did you use to edit them like that?

5 days agoby slig

> 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.

5 days agoby fhennig

I 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.

5 days agoby thisisit

Google 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.

5 days agoby dvcoolarun

I 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.

5 days agoby latexr

The testimonials on the landing page, where are they sourced from?

5 days agoby BostonFern

It'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.

5 days agoby lain98

Feels like a LinkedIn influencer wrote this.

5 days agoby callamdelaney

Actually, having AI to do this kind of schlep work of analyzing my spending is something I’m really looking forward to.

5 days agoby artursapek

I will never us it if I have to pay. Its not clear what this gets me over any other spreadsheet .

5 days agoby jaffa2

Congrats on your success. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that are needed the most.

5 days agoby betorolla

Nice. I've been looking for a decent budget spreadsheet for a while. Great price.

5 days agoby mfro

Congrats!

Why does the page always scroll to the top when focused/changing tabs back to it? :(

5 days agoby XCSme

Congratulations on making the life of ~2k people a bit better.

5 days agoby fedeb95

Very cool. What did you see to do the screen recordings?

5 days agoby fersarr

c'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

5 days agoby didntknowyou

This 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.

5 days agoby danieltanfh95

Oh 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
    )

5 days agoby cloverich

Nice G

5 days agoby backendWizard

make it 2301

5 days agoby aswegs8

> Built on Google Sheets you own your data

What?

5 days agoby Qision