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Lunch Money 2.0 — Delightfully simple budgeting
Lunch Money is a web-based personal finance and budgeting tool for the modern-day spender with:
- native multicurrency support
- powerful transaction utilities
- a complex and customizable rules engine
- a developer API
- CSV importing tool
- and much more!
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Replies
Hello Product Hunt 👋! My name is Jen and I'm the one-woman team behind Lunch Money.
Quick backstory
I started working on Lunch Money as a digital nomad in Fukuoka, Japan in January 2019 (more about that here). Fast-forward 8 months later, I launched Lunch Money into the wild to take on big names like Mint and YNAB.
What's new?
Since our first feature on Product Hunt 7 months ago, we've matured a lot as a product and added a slew of new core features including:
💥 Fully customizable Rules Engine to automate your workflow
💥 Developer API for your own tools and plug-ins
💥 CSV-based transaction importing tool
💥 Query Tool to run analytics against your transactions
👉 See why users choose Lunch Money, in their own words! 👈
Pricing & Product Hunt Promo
Lunch Money offers pricing in both USD and CAD. Both monthly & yearly subscriptions are available.
Use code PH2020 to get 25% off your first annual subscription! (Pst- if you sign up today, the code will be automatically applied!)
Quick FAQ
Is my bank supported for automatic imports?
We use Plaid to automatically import transactions from most US & Canadian banks. If you're outside of this region, I encourage you to check out our CSV import tool or look into building your own integration with our API. Almost 40% of our users are outside of US & Canada, so these have proven to be sustainable methods for getting transactions into Lunch Money!
Is there a mobile app?
The short answer is "not yet". Since we are a small development team of 1, our current biggest strength is speed of iteration. Once we introduce a new platform, our development cycles will get drastically longer. We're focused on rounding out the core product more before we put effort into a mobile app. But it's definitely coming soon :)
Thank you for considering Lunch Money!
Feel free to comment below, reach out to me via Twitter (@lunchbag or @lunchmoney_app) or email jen@lunchmoney.app. I'd love to hear what you think! 😄
@lunchbag "Lunch Money offers pricing in both USD and CAD." This was the fastest way you put me off, a UK person who is one of 60% of your users. There's lots of ways you can receive money of different currencies, why limit yourself to just USD or CAD? Limiting automatic import is one thing, but I wouldn't mind using the CSV tool you mention in your FaQ.
@iamgp If it was possible, we would charge in *all the currencies*, considering how we strive to be internationally-friendly with our multicurrency features. The main issue is we're a Canadian-based company and we're limited by Stripe to only accepting payments in USD & CAD. Being a Canadian-based company is also why we have limits on automatic imports. None of it is by choice, it's simply the landscape that recent European data legislation has introduced. We're continuously working with relevant companies in the EU & UK to get around this but as I'm sure you can imagine, it's going to be a long and arduous process.
The other alternative is for us to incorporate somewhere in the EU and be able to charge in more currencies and be within the law to automatically import bank data. But this will only introduce more fees and higher liabilities for us, and as a tiny bootstrapped start-up, it's simply not within scope right now.
Almost 40% of our users are international, with a high proportion of them in the UK. Happy to report they've no complaints on these limitations with Lunch Money. A few have even written their own integrations to UK-based banks using our developer API. The Monzo one is open-sourced :)
Hey Jen fantastic work. I've been a loyal user for about four months. Launch Money gets pretty close to the app I always wanted to build and its already much better than Mint for my use cases. Keep up the good work.
I was a long time Mint user because I felt I had no other options. YNAB wasn't quite for me either but I had always been looking for an app that could replace Mint for transaction review and budgeting especially. When I listened to Jen on Indie Hackers Podcast I was pumped it give Lunch Money a try.
After a test run, I was 100% in. I've made feature requests and asked questions and have always gotten a prompt, thoughtful response from Jen. It's also incredible how many new features she's released.
Anyways, I'm a huge fan, I'm happy to pay for an annual subscription, and I can't wait for the bright future ahead of Lunch Money.
Thanks @lunchbag !
I've been using Lunch Money since January as a replacement for Mint, which I had been using since 2010! I got tired of not having the level of control I needed over categorizing my transactions, which meant that my "budgeting" was just verifying I wasn't going over a total amount at the end of every month. With complex custom rules, easy transaction grouping/splitting, and detailed analysis, Lunch Money put me back in control and gives me better visibility into our spending. Plus, I no longer have to fend off the ads for financial products or the constant false alarm emails that warn me about "Upcoming Bills" or "Large Transactions".
Jen has been incredibly responsive to requests and bugs. She's always churning out new, important features and the product feels way more polished than its competitors. I truly don't know how she stays so attentive and productive as a solo founder.
Looking forward to seeing how Lunch Money shapes up over the next few years! Congrats on the 2.0 launch @lunchbag !
@blakeburch_
> I truly don't know how she stays so attentive and productive as a solo founder.
Ah, I don't know either but I'm sure glad it comes off that way! 😂
Thank you for the support and the incredible review, Blake! 😄
I'm a YNAB user (that just happens to be what I use), but I have tried lunch money. I can't express how well built and smooth the entire app is. Its probably a year or two old but its already significantly better than mint and close to YNAB in overall finish. Honestly worth a fair shot especially if YNAB is not your thing
Fantastic product! Thanks for sharing so much about the process of creating it, it's very inspirational for other solopreneurs like myself.
Lunch Money looks fantastic! Great to see an indie maker challenge much larger competitors in this space, and doing it in a sustainable way.
If you'd like to know more about how Jen built the product, check out her recent interview with @csallen on the Indie Hackers Podcast:
https://www.indiehackers.com/pod...
Congrats on the launch, @lunchbag !
YNAB wasn't for me, and I've been using Tiller Money Feeds for Google Sheets for a while. I really like the flexibility of Tiller -- it's super nice to just literally have everything in a big spreadsheet. That being said, I do miss some of the conveniences of having a web-based interface. I'd like to give this a try.
@steveklbnf Hi Steve, feel free to reach out if you have any questions as you're trying out Lunch Money!
Hi Jen, as a dually 🇨🇦🇺🇸It's nice to see the multi currency support and even being able to pay in either CAD/USD.
Have tried a lot of finance products, this one looks pretty close to what I do in my spreadsheets, will give it a whirl.
@tamarabyte Hi Tamara, yes most Canadian banks are supported. I myself am Canadian and have TD, RBC and Tangerine successfully linked.
Congrats on the launch @lunchbag!
I have struggled to find the right budgeting app as a person who does and a lot of multi-currency spending. I signed up this morning and can honestly say so far this is the best solution I have come across. The UX is clear and concise, the onboarding flow is 🔥, and the intuitive logic around grouping and re-occurring charges is very well done. Also supporting 🇨🇦's makes it just that much better (sending this from over in Waterloo).
@zlwaterfield That is awesome, I'm glad to hear Lunch Money meets your needs! Thank you so much for the support, and hello from a fellow UW alum 👋!
Looks good! I haven't tried it yet but have a question relating to multi-currency support.
I read on the website that Lunch Money uses the conversion rate of the date of the transaction to make sure it's "as accurate as possible."
But is it possible to manually set a conversion rate? Automatically setting the rate doesn't always work. Take the following scenarios as examples of that.
1) I pay for something in USD from my EUR account. I will know exactly how much I paid *in euro* as well as the equivalent amount in USD.
2) I transfer EUR from my EUR account to my USD account.
@anna_0x Hi Anna! Thanks for sharing your use case. Being able to manually override a particular transaction's currency rate is not currently supported but has been requested before. We will consider implementing this as the demand for this feature grows– your input definitely helps with that!
I'm definitely going to check this out. I have never really liked any of the budget apps or tools out there but this one sounds promising as I'm also a digital nomad! Congrats on the launch!
Summer Bod 2020