Show HN: Lit.money – Ethically designed to be a private, simple way to see money
I know it's 2025, and you might be wondering why there's a need for a personal finance web app. I'd like to share my story and why I created lit.Money.
During COVID, I started actively managing my finances, primarily optimizing for FIRE and monitoring my progress. There are apps in India, but I didn't like their UI. I don't like to exchange messages or call with accountant for bank details or transaction queries. I also wanted a simple way to view my partner's and family's finances in one place. I considered Copilot, but it wasn't available in India. While there are 1 or 2 good apps available, none offer financial view sharing with partners, family, or accountants.
I wanted a simple, user-friendly web app, so I built lit.money (currently available as a web app).
Some key features: - View all your data on a single screen, including the number of transactions and accounts - Delete all your data with a single click (no need to contact support or wait) - "Finspace" -> a financial space where you can share your finances with partners, family, or accountants with customizable permissions (read/write) and account visibility - Easily bulk edit transactions and export data
I'm not trying to create the next big thing, just a simple project that provides real value. I would greatly appreciate your feedback! There's a DEMO MODE available to try it easily, or if you're busy, you can check out some videos (thanks to my wife, she made them): https://www.youtube.com/@litmoneyapp
Is it really so hard to explain what your product is on the landing page? It's not just this app, it's most of the products promoted on HN. Also every other cloud app promises privacy until private equity shows up.
Currently my goal is to get feedback. Yours will be really helpful.
https://lunchmoney.app/
Meanwhile can you check lit.money and share some feedback?
It has demo account option so you can easily check it.
Your landing page tells me so little about your app features that I am not even interested in trying it out. You have a lot of competition in this space. It's great to hear about my data being protected but that's not good enough if it doesn't have good features compared to the alternatives.
About synching of data, it is possible of provide auto synch in background. Will explore in coming days.
Personal finance apps need to be trustworthy and be around for the long haul - I need them to just hum along and not take me on a venture-backed roller coaster.
Right now my focus is just to talk to people and improve it.
Best luck
But you can mail me, we can plan something.
I posted here mainly to get feedback so i can improve it.
I'm working on a similar thing, except making sure we can actually live up to that promise: that means making the software entirely feasible to run on-prem (i.e. on your own computer), on your own cloud infrastructure, or provided by a third-party provider of your choice. (We chose AGPL3 to avoid the obvious problems with third party hosting trying to add features or change things and then locking you into their platform.)
Of course, this takes a bit more effort, and some things like Plaid are nearly impossible to use when self-hosted, but we've found some pretty good workarounds for that.
Also will work on self hosting and offline support once product get mature.
But "I'll never sell the data" is different from "this service will never sell the data". If you sell the service, will you put it in the contract that any subsequent owner can never monetise the data? Will you decline a sale if they decline? How will you justify that to the board? What if they fire you to push the sale through?
Etc etc. "We'll never sell your data" is just empty words to me, except in one case: if you designed a system that never has my data in the first place.
The challenge is after it grows/becomes more successful, something happens that you lose control of the company, or perhaps you take some investment money (which is completely reasonable to do) and then they want you to start changing how you do things. You might not even "sell" the data - you might be forced to give it away.
Our biggest customer wants to pay us to cloud host it for them and manage the whole thing.
Other's have already covered this so for you (OP) this will be redundant, but I do want to chime in regarding the general trend of apps/services everywhere (not just here on HN) focusing too much on the "Sell" of how their mcguffin will improve my life, but not actually saying what the heck their mcguffin actually is/does. To return to the post at hand, as an example, I'd change the byline uptop to say:
> An ethically designed financial management app to be the private and simple way to see your money, finally.
That maintains your pitch while also saying upfront and uptop in the first 6 words what it is/does.
Next, I'm not trying to be negative here, but rather acknowledge a very real problem that others have touched on and that anyone (myself included) launching any product will face in the current era:
Best Intentions != Best Practices. Security is hard. Earning trust is even harder. Especially when it comes to money. It's doubly difficult in early days as building out an app while maintaining security and respecting privacy is no minor task (even if "easy", it's still often tedious and easy to make mistakes), and in the context of finance/banking, there's unfortunately a large target on the app/services's proverbial back and impetus for users to have a far more critical and unforgiving eye given the potential fallout of someone leveraging or publishing an exploit.
There's also the ever looming potential of the original team selling the company/product/service to someone else (eg, Private Equity) who - despite claims to the contrary - rarely share the same ethos or respect for their newly acquired users as the founder/founding team does/did.
As to why people tend to be critical/suspicious: See another recent HN post "Everyone Knows your Location[0]" regarding all the practically systemic and endemic ways that applications/services expose/harvest data, and how difficult it can be to be aware of, mitigate and protect against these things. Exploiting user faith/data is unfortunately the norm now, not the exception, thus people's suspicions.
Wish you luck OP, because the market absolutely could use a privacy/user respecting app in this space.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716704
Can you give the web app a try and share some feedback on it?