Finances

Why I built it

Every finance app I used eventually redesigned its data model out from under me: categories merged, budgets became something else, exports stopped matching. I did not want features; I wanted to log transactions the same way for a decade. Having used these tools daily for years, the requirements were unusually clear, so building was cheaper than adapting again.

Architecture

The design goal was deployability. A single PostgREST process in front of PostgreSQL is the entire backend: tables, views and functions define the API, database roles enforce permissions, and login is a stored procedure that validates a hashed token and mints a JWT. There is no application server to patch or scale. The frontend is a React, Vite, TypeScript and Tailwind app that builds to static files, so it can live on Vercel or Cloudflare while the database sits on a small Oracle free-tier instance. Docker Compose brings the whole thing up locally with no configuration.

Functionally it covers accounts organised by type, a ledger with per-day running totals and export, an asset-breakdown history chart, and budgets planned yearly and executed monthly with minimum, maximum and remaining per category. The MCP server lets an assistant read balances and post transactions directly.