Clearlog

Why I built it

I've tried most personal finance apps. They all want to connect to your bank, categorise your transactions automatically, send you weekly digests, and eventually upsell you to a premium tier. The result is an app that does a lot of things imperfectly and asks for a lot of trust in exchange.

What I actually wanted: open the app, type an amount, type a category, close the app. See a chart at the end of the month. Nothing else. Clearlog is that app. No bank sync. No AI. No subscription. Just fast manual entry and clean charts.

What I built

The core loop is three taps: amount, category, done. The chart view shows spending by category over the current month, with a simple month-selector to go back. That's the whole product.

The technical decision worth noting: SQLite over a hosted database. Clearlog runs entirely on the user's device. There's no server storing financial data, no account to create, no privacy policy to worry about. The data lives in a local SQLite file. This was a deliberate constraint — I didn't want to be responsible for anyone's financial data, and I didn't want to build auth.

A decision I'd revisit

The category system is currently a flat list the user manages manually. Three users have asked for sub-categories — "Food > Groceries" vs "Food > Restaurants." I've resisted it because sub-categories are where simple finance apps become complicated finance apps. But the request is legitimate and I probably drew the line in the wrong place. A one-level hierarchy might be worth adding.

Outcome

Around 200 active users — people who open it at least once a week. No marketing, no Product Hunt launch, no social posts. It spread through word of mouth among people who wanted exactly what it does. The restraint is the feature. A few users have emailed to say it's the first finance app they've actually stuck with. That's the outcome I was hoping for.