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ryan3789437on Show HN: I built a seriously detailed free financial planner

The connector can do both. It is faster to setup a plan in the app if you are familiar with using these types of tools and know a fair amount about personal finance. If you are less familiar with the space then Claude is really good at answering questions and coming up with reasonable guesses for inputs you might not want to bother figuring out on your own (e.g. the cost of college).

I think where the connector really shines is setting up multiple scenarios and comparing the outputs. One pain point of these kinds of multi scenario analysis tools is keeping track of what is different between the setup of each scenario and how those differences in inputs impact the outputs. Claude is really good at this.

ryan3789437on Show HN: I built a seriously detailed free financial planner

There is a semi guided journey. Click Home, delete the sample plan and then click Get Started. It will ask you a series of "simple" questions and then walk you through a series of forms where you can enter your numbers.

ryan3789437on Show HN: I built a seriously detailed free financial planner

Click Home. Delete the sample plan and then you can start from scratch creating your own plan.

ryan3789437on Show HN: I built a seriously detailed free financial planner

Was this on mobile?

I started working on FinZot before vibe coding was a thing. It was originally a project to learn rust/wasm. The planning engine is very much not vibe coded. I had too much fun optimizing the engine such that monte carlo trials run trials in ~1ms to have AI write the code. The newer parts of the UI were written by AI. AI has also been amazingly helpful to scale testing.

ryan3789437on Show HN: I built a seriously detailed free financial planner

Thanks.

I do not have any plans to integrate with banks directly mostly for security reasons. In the paid version you can give Claude a screenshot of your balances/budget and it can update the plan and publish it to the app. Does ActualBudget offer a Claude connector? I have never tried it but I bet with both connectors Claude could read from ActualBudget and update FinZot plans in one conversation.

I am also not currently considering true self hosting. The guest mode has no time limit and does not require you to sign in and your data does not leave the browser. I will consider adding a feature to import and export plans.