I got tired of feeding my expense tracker, so I spent years building one that feeds itself

TL;DR: I built FinMan — a free personal finance app that imports any bank statement with AI, reads utility meters and fuel receipts from photos sent to a Telegram/WhatsApp bot, and tells me what one kilometer in my car actually costs. It started as a Perl script. Here is what I learned along the way.

The problem with every finance app I tried

I just wanted to know where my money goes. Simple wish, right?

I tried the popular trackers. Every single one failed me the same way: too much manual work. Enter every expense by hand. Configure categories for an hour. And almost none of them could pick up online card payments automatically — which is where most of my money actually went.

At some point I caught myself spending more time feeding the tracker than understanding my finances. So I did the developer thing: I wrote my own.