Solo full-stack developer & designer · Personal product · 2024–2026
spendsage
A complete personal-finance app with an AI layer that handles the tedious parts: categorizing, parsing and summarizing your money.
The challenge
SpendSage is a personal financial-management app to track income and expenses, plan recurring and scheduled payments, and turn raw transactions into a clear picture through dashboards and reports. Built as a real product and shipped to production.
Most personal-finance tools are either too simplistic to be useful or so tedious that people abandon them. Manual data entry and categorization kill the habit. The goal was a complete, fast finance app that removes that friction: putting AI to work on the boring parts (categorizing, parsing, summarizing) while a clean dashboard turns transactions into decisions.
The approach
- Full-stack architecture on Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript, with Prisma ORM over PostgreSQL and Clerk for authentication.
- Type-safe end to end: React Hook Form + Zod for validation, TanStack Query for data fetching and Zustand for lightweight global state.
- Data model designed around Transactions, Payment Schedules and Payment Items to handle recurring and planned payments cleanly.
- Real-time financial reporting with Recharts and Chart.js, and a dashboard as the single overview of the user's finances.
- Shadcn UI + Tailwind CSS for a fast, consistent and accessible interface.
- An AI layer built on Anthropic's Claude, exposed through dedicated API routes for categorization, transaction parsing, insights and report summaries.
How I leverage AI
I use Claude as a core part of my workflow, and I know how to get the most out of it. With it I explore the codebase, generate boilerplate and refactor safely, which let me deliver features and refactors roughly 5× faster than a traditional solo workflow, without giving up control over architecture or quality. This is how I work today: an expert who leverages AI, from architecture to delivery.
AI features shipped
- Transaction categorization
- Natural-language transaction parsing
- Financial insights
- Report summaries
Tech stack
- Next.js
- Tailwind CSS
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Clerk
Have a project like this?
I design and ship complete web products, with a strong command of AI. Let’s talk.
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