I built an app to help you track expenses and turn it into a competition

[GRardB]

Hey everyone,

For the past few months, I've been working on a side project that I feel like is at a good enough point to release to my fellow Mustachians!

Guapington

I built Guapington because my girlfriend and I started competing to see who could spend less money each month. Originally, we set up a spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and we were tracking expenses that way. In not much time, it become difficult to manage and extremely slow. I felt like I make something better!

Here are some things about the project which I expect people will ask about:

How much does it cost?

Absolutely nothing. I fully intend for this to be free indefinitely. It costs me money to host it, but unless it becomes wildly popular, I don't see myself spending too much to keep it going. That being said, it would be nice to at least break even at some point. In the future, I can see myself adding the ability to accept donations or some sort of "premium" features.

Why do I need to track expenses manually?

This is by design, and also, building something like Mint is way more than one person can do in any reasonable amount of time. I realize this adds friction, but I've found that most people who don't track expenses manually are unaware of how much money they actually spend each month, even if they use Mint. If you set it and forget it, then you... will forget it!

Also, I've found that Mint doesn't handle a lot of things well with its automatic approach, such as cash expenses and its expense categorization. I found myself going in and fixing things manually all the time, so I might as well add each expense manually anyway!

Is there a mobile app?

No, but I would like to build one, especially if enough people use Guapington! That being said, the website works pretty well on mobile.

What are categories being used for?

Nothing at the moment, but I want to add some graphs and more filtering options on the expenses page.

Okay, what else do you want to build?

We'll see! I have a huge list of features that I want to build for it, but I'd also like to have input from users. Since I'm just one human being doing this in my free time, I could use help figuring out how to prioritize features. Some ideas:

• Use categories for things (e.g. graphs and filters)
• The ability for a group to set "rules." The idea is that if you wanted to compete with somebody who had a huge difference in rent payment, for example, you could exclude the rent/mortage category from being calculated in your competition.
• Make the site more accessible. As of now, I think that someone using a screenreader (and potentially other assistive devices) would have trouble using it.
• Social signup (i.e. sign in with Facebook, Google, Twitter)
• Ability to mark expenses as "essential," as well as some features around this (e.g. a graph showing your essential vs non-essential expenses)
• Build a mobile app
• Ability to upload a CSV file to import past expenses (I think a lot of people here track their expenses that way)
• An option to set your currency if you don't live somewhere where the dollar symbol denotes your currency
• I also need to figure out how to make the site faster. At the moment, it's not as snappy as I'd like it to be.

Anyway, that's it for me. Please let me know if you like it, love it, or hate it, and tell me why! I'm accepting any and all feedback, and would really appreciate bug reports if you find something broken.