Help me test my open source budgeting web app | Hacker News Reader

Help me test my open source budgeting web app

sumapp.com

9 pointswintonius10 comments

Okay, so its no Mint, but its perfect for people who think Mint is overkill or don't want to give a web app their bank information.

I made it for semi-computer illiterate people to manage a budget over email. So far it has changed my girlfriend and my mom's life.

On a side note, I wrote it in Ruby with help from Sinatra. I think it is a pretty good example of how to write a class-based Sinatra app with a full test suite.

Any suggestions or help spreading the word would be much appreciated!

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Nice idea and execution. A few questions/comments.

1. Does the app assume that users want to spend about the same amount every day? I'll sometimes spend $0 one day and $1000+ the next day (e.g. mortgage payment). I'm entirely interested in keeping my monthly spending within a limit, but not my daily or weekly spending.

2. I've never taken to Mint or Quickbooks. My finances are pretty complicated, thanks to several income streams and companies, and tools like Mint/Qb assume that you care about ALL of your income and expenses equally. But all I care about is my overall monthly spending (am I going into debt?), and my spending within categories (how much did I blow on eating out this month?).

Have you thought about adding optional categories/tags? So if you want to keep your "beer" spending to, say, $750/month, you can track how much you have left to spend on beer, alongside your tally of total spending? Email/text in "12.55 +beer" and it gets tagged with beer.

The more I think about this, the more I like it. And I love that it's open-sourced. Watch for a fork. ;)

1. It does assume that users have a daily budget, however the projected daily, weekly, and monthly budget amounts are still helpful in determining exactly how much damage you're doing.

2. Exactly my situation.

3. That is a great idea. If I were to add extra functionality, it would be in a way that keeps the existing system working as is, but has extras for "power users". Your idea fits right in line with that.

I've seen way too many people who think budgeting is too hard, or they need to learn some program/web app to do it. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Ok so its no Mint, but its perfect for people who think Mint is overkill or do not want to give their bank login to a web app.

It is targeted towards less-than-computer-literate people who know how to use email. I'm not quite sure how to reach my target audience yet :). So far it has changed my girlfriend and my mom's life. They see budgeting as a fun game now.

On a side note, I wrote it in Ruby with help from Sinatra. I think it is a pretty good example of a class-based Sinatra app with a full test suite.

You shouldn't ask for an email address without some sort of privacy policy statement.

Very true. Completely slipped my mind. I'll get one up tonight.

(Done)

Looks interesting. I'll give it a try.

What about accepting sms messages in addition to the emails. I did a couple of test projects with textmarks.com. It's free (with an ad on every outbound message), but it would work well for your app.

I had never heard of textmarks. Great tip.

I built a site to keep tracking of my bowling average during different leagues and practice using textmarks' API.

http://whatsmyaverage.com/

Very easy! I agree, this might be the wrong audience for this. Maybe look into telling the credit relief orgs about it.

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