How I Built A Net Worth Tracker
Keep your sensitive financial data within your control.
After trying multiple different finance apps, such as Copilot, Rocket Money, and Mint, I finally gave up and built one that works for me.
I built it with a minimal set of essential features, and data privacy at heart.
When using third-party apps, you have to give others access to your data, one way or another. Most of these apps nowadays use Plaid to connect securely to your bank accounts. Though it’s marketed as being “secure”, and of course it is for the most part, a part of me still feels uncomfortable with the idea.
You are essentially giving access to someone you don’t know, to access your bank information periodically, without your consent.
Convenient? Yes. Risky? In my opinion, yes.
Most finance apps tend to be very feature-rich; to a point where it feels bloated to me. I don’t end up using 90% of the features — budgeting, checking credit scores, creating savings buckets, canceling subscriptions, etc.
Instead, I needed an app that locally stores my financial data (only barebones) without any credentials or private access, and some simple data visualization to show me which direction my financial health is trending.
That’s why, I built my own web app using ReactJS, ChakraUI, FastAPI, and Postgres.
Let’s start with a simple demo.
Feature Set
Fundamentally, the app does 3–4 things only:
- Add accounts with an alias (E.g — Chase Checkings, AMEX Savings)
- Add account balance at a given date (E.g — $2,000 on 2023–05–23)
- Chart to see net worth change over time
- Summary of changes (E.g — Last 30 days, Last 1 month, Last 1 year, etc)
I will add a few screenshots to make things more tangible.
Note: The app uses mock data only, and does not reflect reality.
