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Been really awesome to follow your journey! Congrats on 5 years building ProjectionLab!

Awesome to hear! (founder of Lunch Money here :)- thanks for the shoutout!)

Thanks for sharing. Have you experienced noticeable impact to your usage rate?

Thanks for the mention and for your continuous support! Jen here, founder of Lunch Money :) We've come a long way since the solo dev days– happy to announce we're a core team of 5 now (yes, still bootstrapped!) and have lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline for 2025!

Jen here– thank you so much for the mention!

Lunch Money founder here! Thanks for flagging :) My guess is that it was definitely inspired by Lunch Money as the founders here have reached out to me before about liking my branding.

I did not use any stock illustrations for our logo– the idea was thought up by me and subsequently digitally illustrated by me also. I've had my logo/branding both partly and fully copied time and time again, and while seeing this is a bit annoying, I'd chalk it up to "heavy inspiration" over out-right copying. That being said, Leave Me Alone is doing great stuff in a different space and I am rooting for their success.

We don't adhere to any one budgeting philosophy. While we won't walk you through the envelope style budgeting the way YNAB does, you can certainly mimic it with the platform!

Thanks for the mention!

Jen here- founder of Lunch Money. Definitely give us a try if you're looking for something more modern and user-friendly. Lunch Money is less rigid than YNAB so much easier to get started on and build habits with.

If you (or anyone else reading this) decide to try it out, let me know you're from HN and I'll hook you up with a free month on top of the 14 day trial :)

Congrats Michael! Your hard work over the last few months is evident. I wish you only the best from here onwards!

Hey, thanks! Honestly my thinking right now is that I want to continue growing Lunch Money on my own up until a certain ARR- I feel there's no reason to think I can't at this point. Past that, I may start to think about hiring outside help though I have no idea what that would look like. It would also heavily depend on where I'm at in my personal life as well!

Hi HN! OP here. Been working on my product, Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app), full-time since I launched it roughly 10 months ago. Sharing my learnings and thoughts along the way as it can be pretty lonely and daunting as a solo founder out there. Let me know if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Hi :) OP and founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) here. Sharing my experiences through writing makes the whole journey as a company of one less lonely. Thanks for your readership!

Thank you for the shoutout, and that's wonderful to hear! :D

First of all, congratulations! That's really exciting!

This is a costly mistake to learn, but to offer a bit of hope, at my last start-up we accidentally racked up high costs on the location API. Our CEO hopped on the phone with them a few times and was able to get the bill down. Good luck!

I used to track it all in a spreadsheet by hand and eventually turned that spreadsheet into a web app which I (and a few hundred others!) are using today. It's called Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) if you're interested.

I used to track everything in a spreadsheet manually and early last year finally found time to turn it into an app which pulls in my credit card transactions automatically. I still input lots of expenses manually since I'm living in a primarily cash-based society and it works great for my needs.

Not sure what your idea of "sophisticated" is, but it's definitely the opposite of a terminal-based app. It's built on a modern web stack and it's called Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app)!

Thanks!

We raise our prices every few months so you will be grandfathered into the pricing plan at sign up. Aside from that and occasional coupon codes for first year subscriptions, we don't have any other payment schemes (yet!).

That's so awesome to hear, thanks for sharing!

What personal finance apps have you tried with budgeting? There are a few on the market, the most popular being YNAB and Mint. My personal opinion is that Mint tries to do too much while YNAB forces you into a rigid philosophy.

I made Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) as a potential happy medium between the two. If you end up trying it out, feel free to let me know what you think!

Hi OP, I was in your exact position just over a year ago. I had been using my own spreadsheet for 1.5 years and finally found time to turn it into a web app (backstory at https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money)

The main features I found missing in other budgeting apps that prompted me to make my own were:

- native multicurrency support (I travel a lot and am a digital nomad by lifestyle, so this was quite important to me)

- curtains pulled on the "magic" that some budgeting apps try to add to my transactions

- the ability to split/group transactions so I can see how much I actually spent when I pick up a large bill and friends pay me back

- separate tracking of recurring expenses

- seeing historical spending trends and having information help drive my budget for the next month

I've implemented all of this and more. If you're interested, check it out at https://lunchmoney.app. I'd love to hear what you think.

In terms of what's missing that's not currently on the roadmap:

- rollover budgets

- a savings and/or goals feature

- debt repayment feature

As made evident by this thread, everyone has their own preferred way to budget, and of course there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Looking forward to seeing what you build, if you end up going down that path. Cheers!

Thanks for giving Lunch Money a shot! The mobile app is coming soon, but as a one-woman team, I'm focused 100% on rounding out the core product before introducing another platform and slowing down my development cycles. Cheers!

Check out https://lunchmoney.app (disclaimer: I'm the founder). We have a fully customizable rules engine which we've just augmented to allow for email notifications, so you can create very specific criteria for imported transactions to be alerted on.

Hi! Founder of https://lunchmoney.app here. On the go right now, but really quickly, I've built a Rules engine within the product that does exactly what you're looking for. Also, granular settings for whether a category will be counted towards income, budget and/or totals allows for greater control over organizing your transactions. If you end up checking it out, let me know what you think!

Thanks for the awesome review and for your continued support!

Ah, that sounds complicated.

Feel free to let me know if you run into anything during your trial!

Au contraire, I was diligently rationing my free test accounts, haha!

Thanks for reading!

Good point! Also, web apps are definitely making a comeback!

Noted! I know a friend of mine reads my blog via an RSS reader, so they still might be able to automatically parse it?

Here's a quick page on Lunch Money vs Mint: https://lunchmoney.app/compare/mint-alternative

Pasting from an earlier comment:

Totally understandable that you'd like to avoid using services like Plaid. We have a lot of users who share the same sentiment, and also many international users who cannot use Plaid, so it's a priority to ensure the experience is without Plaid is still an enjoyable/practical one.

We offer two other ways to bulk insert transactions: 1. we offer a CSV import tool, and 2. we are currently beta-testing our developer API so you could write your own integrations to import data

Thank you for the support!