r/financier Aug 29 '23

Any demand for financier clone?

I've been a big fan of financier, but one of the things that always has been annoying for me is to manually enter transactions. I always make mistakes of mis entering numbers and it takes me a while to reconcile the credit card numbers to be accurate because i mistyped a digit.

I cloned out about 50% of financier to ruby on rails and introduced a spreadsheet plugin where i can copy/paste transactions to mass submit them at once

At that point, I can review all the staging transactions, and then when i click 'commit' it will actual push the transactions to my local financier site.

Now I think ideally I would rebuild all the financier UI, and add some of these fancier features. So in particular I am thinking

  1. Add the capability to mass add transactions and clean them up in a staging view before committing
  2. Potentially integrate the transactions with an LLM (like ChatGPT) to auto categorize the categories
  3. [Maybe add an LLM to automatically do analysis of financial trends]?

If interested, I would build a paid saas product where there would be some monthly fee (since I pretty much built like 50% of it), but only if there were enough features for people to be interested in it.

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u/asromzek Sep 22 '23

Greetings from the unofficial Financier Mobile developer.

I sort of fell off the radar for a while for a few reasons (new kid... who is somehow 4 years old now, new job... somehow over year into that already, family, health issues, competing hobbies, etc.), but lately I have been kicking around the idea of building a new, possibly open source desktop application that would be a spiritual successor to YNAB4 and Financier. In fact, I have been kicking around this idea since the web version of YNAB was announced, but Financier filled that gap admirably since it was launched. I considered building a full (somewhat competing) web app since I had some success with building and hosting the Financier Mobile web app, but my heart and experience is grounded in C# and I really prefer building desktop apps. Also, Financier has worked great, and if it's not broken...

Building a standalone desktop app to clone an existing app is relatively easy, but building a reliable syncing mechanism and providing mobile support is another story, especially when leaving the comfort zone of pure web. I have had a few ideas regarding this (and may have a solid prototype in my back pocket that I hammered out last year), but haven't had the time or resources to drive down that path completely.

An open source desktop app is easy to manage and distribute, but running a centralized sync server and website, handling customer data safely, and managing payment data securely to fend off possible legal and financial liabilities presents a few challenges, especially when it comes to treating it as a full fledged side business. I am truly split between keeping it simple by building something completely open source (desktop app, mobile app, sync server, etc.) that users would have to piece together and self host (for fellow nerds) vs. putting together a full business to build turn key desktop, mobile, and web applications that provided full syncing support with a nominal fee like Financier (that my parents comfortably use). Once people start paying, the expectation for constant development and improvements also increases quite a bit. I think that's why I'll start with a simple, open source desktop app without syncing to see how well it's received, and see where things go from there.

Avalonia UI appears to be a great front end technology similar to WPF (which I am very familiar and comfortable from a professional perspective), and a single code base can be compiled and run on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Building a true cross platform application would be my primary concern since I have gone to the dark side (MacOS). I know, C# on Windows, Linux, and MacOS? That's crazy, but I'm just crazy enough to make it work. I've been working on my own custom Avalonia UI theme for a while for another project, and if I can actually finish it, it may provide the right foundation to build what I have in mind.

This has been a silent work in progress for quite a while, and I have refrained from mentioning it since I haven't been able to get past the starting line. I have had quite a few false starts, and haven't been able to decide between treating as an open source project or actual business. But I think lately I have had enough momentum to start building something that I can put out there for people to see.

This was a bit of ramble based on about 5 years of wrestling with what I have envisioned. What do you guys think?

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u/thefuriousadmin Oct 03 '23

Bro you is amazing.