A Simple Finance Tracker
13.11.2023
A few years ago, I started using a popular finance tracking app on my iPhone to keep track of my personal expenses. While it worked, I found many of its features to be unnecessarily complex for my needs. I didn’t want a full budgeting suite, just a clean and minimal way to log my expenses quickly and keep track of my spendings.
That’s when I decided to build something custom. I took the opportunity to learn the basics of Swift and developed a small iOS app tailored to my own workflow. It was exactly what I wanted but, since I wasn’t planning to publish it on the App Store, the app would expire every month and I had to reinstall it via Xcode.
So, I rewrote the entire thing as a Progressive Web App (PWA) hosted on my Raspberry Pi. I used local storage to persist the data directly on the device and implemented a service worker to make it fully usable offline. This way, the app caches all assets and allows me to use it seamlessly even when I’m not connected to the network.
This little tool has now become part of my daily routine, and I’ve been using it consistently for over three years. It’s a great example of how a small, custom-built solution can be more enjoyable than any over-engineered alternative.