niztk

Big thanks to everyone who downloaded and tried the app, and to those who chipped in even though they could have downloaded it for free (I was very surprised to see so many supporting the effort). I just shipped 0.4.1, which targets feedback from splittydev, edarchis about typing issues, codebje about AU banks and CSV formats, edarchis (Belgium) about European CSVs and IBAN cuts, edarchis and splittydev about memory pressure while the checker model is being loaded, robotresearcher and kailovel about categorization (still a work in progress), altmanaltman and a few others about the heavy checker (off by default now for Macs with 16 GB of RAM or less), and many other pieces of feedback.

0.4.1 is live, and the app will automatically find the update at launch or within 6 hours, download it in the background, and show “Restart to apply” when ready. You can also download it again from pulseos.finance. I'm dedicated to working on this app full-time, so please use the feedback section in the app to share features, bugs, etc., or email me at niz@pulseos.finance.

Agree, a small tuned model, in my case a 0.6B Qwen, beat a bigger general model: stock 8B Qwen.

Thanks for the feedback. Aware of the search field bug, already fixed in 0.4.1 which is shipping soon. Fixing European CSVs and cut IBAN now. Investigating the country-save hang. If you’re keen to retry, email me niz@pulseos.finance and will let you know.

Fair, I'll ship a few improvements and continue iterating with users.

Appreciate the honest feedback.

Thanks again for the report. I did see that the app refreshed its window many times during the first model download and each refresh stole focus from the search field, that's why typing did not work.

The fix is ready and shipping it soon (version 0.4.1)

As for the freeze, I honestly couldn't reproduce it but I suspect it's due to the above symptoms and the fix will likely remove it. Happy to let you know if you email me so that you can retry once the new version is shipped.

fair, screenshots will move up.

Thanks and this is surely a bug. Investigating now. If you are willing to retry later as soon as I ship a fix, please email me niz@pulseos.finance

In all honesty, I don't know what would bring people back since I just launched but a few things the app does unprompted: patterns it finds in spending (insights), money and cash flow, forecast, as for the chat there are always a few suggested questions so you don't always need to know what to ask. But agree, it would be great to hear what returning users actually do.

Thanks, will surely give this a try. So far, I have US today with Canada, UK, AU, NZ and Europe on the roadmap.

Great question and in all honesty, real users just started downloading the app today so I don't have any idea yet on how often a rephrased question succeeded. That being said, a retry costs about 12 to 14 seconds with the checker against 1/10th of a second without so it doubles the wait. What I've tested was that with the checker, even though fewer questions get an answer (about 47% right against 60% without), wrong answers fell to 5 in a sample of 494 questions (compared to 100 wrong without the check). Conversations are hit the most from the moment it answers "not sure" so nothing to build on for the next question. I've also given users the option to switch off the checker for speed. I still have many ideas to try and hopefully I keep improving trade-offs.

Thanks a lot! Will keep iterating.

Hi, only a Mac app today, working on a Windows app next. As for bank connections, yes this was requested and I added a "Connected Mode" ($29 a year Sync Pass) which syncs US banks via Plaid otherwise you can import a CSV which also works with any bank and any currency. As for Qwen3, 0.6B is small enough to run fast on most laptops, showed good evals and easily tunable. In my tests, the tuned 0.6B model scored about level with gpt-4.1-mini on a dataset of 77 real budgeting questions and outperformed a stock 8B model as well.

Thanks for giving it a spin. Will fix the mapping.

Plaid is only used in "Connected Mode" which is optional. Local mode never touches Plaid, it's all CSV for now but will work on PDF parsing next.

Thanks. Well, accuracy depends on the code that owns the ledger, which does all the math against the app data model. I also added checks that compare a couple of readings of the question through the same calculation layer. Since there are also many other moving parts coupled with the ledger (categories, rules, transfers, refunds), it just felt better to own the whole stack.

fair, will likely tweak the top but keep some details.

Thanks much! Will ship a fix soon.

All fair points, will simplify the page.

Apologies, will try to simplify. In a nutshell: Pulse Local is a free budgeting app where you could import bank transactions and ask about spending with the AI running on your machine so neither the data nor your questions leave (in "local mode").

Thanks and good luck!

Indeed, macOS only blocks incoming traffic. For this app and in "local mode", there are only two kinds of requests: one to download the models from HF and an optional version check that sends nothing about the user and can be turned off. A simple test, once you download, try turning off your wifi and use the app.

Thanks, I was planning to add country integrations outside the US. Appreciate the pointer here.

I've tried, they were really bad for this use case.

I've tried with some success but will spend more time on the input layer.

Thanks, will surely look into this.

Thanks for the feedback and describing your budgeting routine and needs. Just to add that the 2.5G checker can be switched off in Settings. The reader is only a small tuned 0.6B model (397 MB).

Chat is optional, the app is a complete and free budgeting app (reports, rules, money flow, forecast etc.). As for privacy, "local" usually means your data not your questions, sure the banks hold the transactions but your questions and analysis shouldn't go to the cloud hence this project.

Appreciate the feedback. There's also a connected mode leveraging Plaid where transactions pass through servers memory and never stored. Outside the US, CSV is the only path for now otherwise agree CSV export is a chore for multi-bank users.

Thanks Nico! The model rarely writes answers, it structure the query (what to count, category, period, grouping, comparison etc.) then plain code does the money math. For questions that code doesn't support, we use the model and label those answers.

We also have a checker that reads the query and we only show figures when the two readings agree otherwise the app rather say not sure. We also rely on a small embedder that returns the 8 past nns to serve as examples.

As for classifiers, the reading is partly classification already, with rules and fixed cues checked first.