Alternatives
Products that do what I spent 4 years bootstrapping a financial planning tool to 30k MAUs does
Hey everyone! I'm back with an update on this post [0]. Last year, I quit my corporate job and went full-time on ProjectionLab, the long-term financial planning app I've been building for the past 4 years, which some of you may recognize. The decision to go all-in felt like a huge leap. But it was the right call, and it's been a good year. And without the HN community, it would not have happened. As I mentioned last time [0], the feedback on my original Show HN is THE reason I'm still here working on this. I'm really grateful for that. And I hope the way I’ve grown PL -- staying bootstrapped…
- 1WI
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…
Oct 2025 · write-it-down.com
- 2IQ
Quick background: I used to code. Studied it in school, wrote some projects, but eventually convinced myself I wasn't cut out for it. Too slow, too many bugs, imposter syndrome — the usual story. So I pivoted, ended up as an investment associate at an early-stage angel fund, and haven't written real code in years. Fast forward to now. I'm a Buffett nerd — big believer in compound interest as a mental model for life. I run compound interest calculations constantly. Not because I need to, but because watching numbers grow over 30-40 years keeps me patient when markets get wild. It's basically…
Jan 2026 · calquio.com
- 3SC
Have been working on this for months, hope you guys will like it. Feel free to share your own side project in the comments.
2012 · sideprojects.com
- 4TA
I built this as a personal finance app that allows me to see how my recurring incomes and expenses will affect my network over the years. So trackm can show up to 4 years in the future and track when your accounts will go negative given you expenses and incomes. I've been dogfooding it for the past 10 days, fixing issues I find from my day-to-day use and now it's at a point where I'm comfortable sharing it with others. The app is free for 30 days, after which it goes into read-only mode. Paying the one-time license fee unlocks it forever.
Mar 2026 · trackm.net
- 5MS
For years, I have struggled to understand my cash flow and save for the future. In addition to that, my wife has many credit cards and accounts that complicate matters. I am building a tool that connects all our accounts, helps us create a budget, and tracks and adjusts expenses on the fly. I am also sprinkling some AI magic on it for financial suggestions. I am looking for feedback on the implementation. More importantly, I am looking for more beta testers to improve the product.
2023 · financemadelovely.com
- 6QO
Hi HN, A while ago I had a mildly depressing realization. Back in 2010, I had around $60k. Like a "responsible" person, I used it as a down payment on an apartment. Recently, out of curiosity, I calculated what would have happened if I had instead put that money into NVIDIA stock. I should probably add some context. For over 10 years I've worked as a developer on trading platforms and financial infrastructure. I made a rule for myself - never trade on the market. In 2015, when Bitcoin traded about 300 usd, my brother and I were talking about whether it was a bubble. He made a bold claim that…
Feb 2026 · shouldhavebought.com
- 7UO
When I see what some HN members have done in a weekend on their projects, it makes it hard to confess that it has taken us 1 year to get to this stage. I kept trying to make things perfect, but finally I have seen the light - it will never be perfect and even in its current state, I see so much we need to improve, but it's something. Instead of delaying even more, I thought I would release it to the best critics out there - HN say hello to MyProperty.com Hope to hear your feedback, criticism, thoughts.
2011
- 81R
Hi HN, We’re a small team working on 13Radar.com, which we launched about two weeks ago after 4 months of development. I’m the founder, and together with the team we’re building a platform that tracks hedge fund portfolios in real-time based on SEC Form 13F filings. AI has been a major helper in our workflow. For a single webpage, we often consult multiple AI systems in parallel, generating different versions and comparing them side by side before deciding on the final design or implementation. More than 60% of the research, design, and coding involved AI assistance. For UI design we used…
Nov 2025 · 13radar.com
- 9AM
Hi HN, Today I'm launching the Net Worth Tracker by Flow Finance, a beautiful and minimalist Excel template that allows individuals to track their assets, liabilities, income, and spending on a monthly basis. The focus of this template is understanding long-term trends in the incoming and outgoing expenses for an individual—always with a focus on maximising insights while minimising user inputs. This project was created because the alternatives, frankly, are completely overwhelming. A friend of mine introduced me to the FIRE Movement and, after doing deep dives through Reddit, I tried to…
2023 · getflow.finance
- 10IB
A few years ago, I started managing my finances using Google Sheets. It worked fine for a while, but then I hit some limitations. As my financial planning needs grew more complex, I found myself struggling with tracking assets and forecasting future financial scenarios. Thus, I started to work in my spare time on building FinancialAha: https://www.financialaha.com - a financial planning app designed to do everything my spreadsheets couldn’t. It is completely free and I intend to add some paid features later on as listed on the pricing page, but I want to keep it free for people…
2024
- 11A9
After analyzing 9 years of HN side project posts, I found some counter-intuitive patterns about what makes projects profitable. Three things that stood out: 1. B2B dominates: 73% of $500+/month projects target businesses, not consumers 2. Speed matters more than polish: Average 47 days from launch to first sale. Most started charging with 3-5 core features. 3. Pricing cluster: 87% price between $20-49. Low enough for impulse purchase, high enough to be sustainable. I compiled this into a dataset of nearly 700 projects with tech stack, pricing, and timeline data. Built it because I was…
Feb 2026
- 12WT
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com
- 13PI
Hey HN! I'm Alex, one of the co-founders at Global Predictions. We are officially launching PortfolioPilot today! Since starting the company 2 years ago, we’ve been working tirelessly to build a personal portfolio management platform that empowers everyday people to feel more confident investing. We focused on aggregating your entire net worth, evaluating across a set of standardized metrics, and offering suggestions based on our commercial-grade Macro Insights & Recommendation Engine. We started by building a product we wanted to use and iterated and refined based on early user feedback. We…
2022
- 14FF
Hey HN, I'm Steve, co-founder of Factor.fyi, a new data platform for querying and visualizing financial datasets using SQL. During the pandemic, I took much more of an active role in managing my portfolio. I wanted to be able to make informed decisions about the investments I was making, and explore financial data in new ways. Market and Econ data are some of the most talked-about and widely-available datasets out there, but I was frustrated by the lack of options to answer questions I had, like, "What would have happened if I had started dollar-cost averaging VTI back in 2013?"[1] Or, "How…
2022 · factor.fyi
- 15VA
Hey guys. For the past 8 months, we've been bootstrapping Vuru and the advice of the HN community has helped us shape our product and business. We are really appreciative of all that we've gotten out of the community and we want to share what we've built. We've recently launched our product, have some paying customers (woohoo!), and we'd love to get your feedback on anything and everything. Check us out at http://www.vuru.co (clickable link in the comments). In advance, thanks for your time!
2011
- 16WB
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com
- 17BQ
Hey HN, I’m from QR Code Developer, a simple SaaS tool for marketers and creators to generate & manage dynamic QR codes. It came out of frustration watching small teams overpay for bloated QR tools that lacked affiliate features or analytics transparency. We’re keeping it clean: privacy-first, no-nonsense pricing, and analytics. I’m currently onboarding a small group of affiliate partners (30% lifetime recurring commission) and would love feedback or thoughts from the HN crowd. Here’s the site: https://qrcodeveloper.com/affiliate AMA or DM—happy to share more behind the scenes.
2025 · qrcodeveloper.com
- 18LC
We've just launched the alpha of a 10-month bootstrapped project at http://www.LifeSnapper.com While I'm going to guess that HN is perhaps not our target audience, I wanted to show you guys what we've built because I've done a lot of helpful reading here over the past two years. I shared some really key links found on HN to our coder, Katherine, and our Sugar Daddy, John while we were laying our team foundations out and that stood us in good stead. We do of course eat our own dogfood, and have made a simple LifeSnap of our company story so far: http://www.lifesnapper.com/LifeSnapper We've…
2011
- 19SH
Hi HN, we’re the cofounders of Lago:an AI-agent powered Chrome extension that becomes every founder’s best friend when accounting season hits. Well automates supplier invoice collection and pipes the data directly into your accounting tools, ERP, or dashboards — with zero effort. Why We’re Building Well: Automating the Missing Half of Payments Our website is at https://wellapp.ai/ and our Github is here: https://github.com/WellApp-ai/well. --- Our Background We’re a team of infrastructure builders with deep roots in European fintech. Over the last decade,…
2025
- 20IB
I’m building a public dashboard to track all the investments I make for my newborn son. Crypto, dividends, growth, milestones. You can follow the project here: [mattiasassets.com] Feedback welcome!
2025 · mattiasassets.com
- 219Y
Would be glad to hear your feedback
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 22FS
Hey HN! I’ve been building Fatebook for the past couple of months. It’s a slack bot to help your team make and track predictions, right where you work. I see forecasting as anti-bullshit technology: - It gives you truthseeking incentives - You communicate your uncertainty as a probability, which is way clearer (70% is better than “probably”) - You can aggregate forecasts to get wisdom of the crowd effects - You can see everyone’s track record, and pay more attention to people who are consistently accurate I’m a fan of prediction markets [0] and forecasting platforms [1]. But predictions on…
2023 · fatebook.io
- 23
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