August 14, 2018

[Show IH] Astra - automated savings and bank transfers

Hi Indie Hackers,

We just launched Astra for iOS on Product Hunt! 🚀 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/astra-for-ios

Astra is mission control for your money and our new iOS app helps you achieve your personal savings goals — automatically.

We built Astra because we were frustrated by the lack of smart tools out there to help manage our cash flow. Maintaining a complicated spreadsheet to manage our finances month to month and pay down debt as quickly as possible was a time-consuming headache. We built a web app last fall that mirrored a lot of the financial modeling we were doing manually but learned that our users didn’t just want to visualize their financial data; they also wanted to automate how they were spending, saving, and paying off debt. Enter our new iOS app.

Our mission is to make your finances more intelligent, empowering, and personal. We’ve built this app so that you can easily and conveniently define transfers between your accounts, and automatically put funds aside for your savings and debt repayment goals. Whether you want to start a rainy day fund or earmark money for dozens of different goals, all you have to do is connect your bank accounts with your online credentials, create your savings goals, and manage the movement of your money with programmable “actions.” Just choose the accounts, the frequency, and the amount — and you can change any action whenever you want.

From a technical perspective, we’ve tackled authentication, ACH transfer scheduling, and account virtualization (for as many savings goals as you’d like). Our planned next steps include automatic bill pay, more action inputs (down to the transaction level), shared goals between users, and dynamic transfer amounts with machine learning models we have ready to deploy (because our cash balances change week-to-week and month-to-month).

We'd love to get feedback from the IH community on Astra so we can make our product even better. Thanks!


  1. 3

    Great idea. I've been trying to research on a similar idea for the Indian market.

    How are you planning to differentiate yourself from incumbents like Acorns / Stash ?

    I downloaded the app and noticed a couple of things:

    1. Infinite loading screen after inputting my bank credentials.

    2. On boarding is still a bit unclear. I don't really know what "make your finances more intelligent, empowering, and personal" means even after I've completed a few steps. Suggestion: either allow me to play around before I key in my bank details or show me up front how the app is going to behave.

    I would also have a single mission like "Astra is going to automate your monthly savings" as opposed to doing 3 vague things like empowerment / intelligent / personal.

    The product looks good.

    Also happy to chat about personal finance and wealth management for the burgeoning Indian middle class. I think there is a massive need for it.

    1. 1

      Thanks Rahul! Great questions and feedback. There's a pretty active discussion on the Product Hunt page - would be game for sharing your question about differentiation there too?

      Here are some more detailed answers for you here:

      VS Acorns / Stash: great products but they offer rules to help you get money into investment accounts (*Acorns does have a "spend" debit card now too). That's great but our take is that putting money into the markets is not for everyone and why should smart tools be limited to that destination type. Savings or debt payments are important too!

      App behavior:

      1. Can you share a screenshot on the loading issue? I'd love to investigate further. You can use Intercom in app to chat with me directly.

      2. Thanks for the input on the onboarding flow - we are definitely still refining that. There was a similar comment on PH, so adding more flexibility here makes sense.

      Mission:

      Well put - I think "Astra is going to automate your monthly savings" is a great Call to Action. I think our mission should be pretty ambitious. A better future for all of our finances is a big, hairy problem that needs attention. Our mission is meant to call that out. :)

      India:

      I'd love to learn more about that particular region and the middle class. I only get snippets of information from our national media when we read on the topic for the US.

      Again, thanks for the detailed feedback. Looking forward to continuing this conversation here and on Product Hunt. 🙌

      1. 2

        Would love to get involved in the PH discussion and give feedback.

        Also I'm a Machine learning engineer by trade. I'm curious to know what kind of ML models you plan to deploy for a problem like this?

        1. 1

          That's awesome! I ❤️ ML/AI. For this first MVP release, we focused on explicit transfer rules to keep it simple. But we have a ton of research at the ready using LSTMs to forecast account balances so that your savings routines can by dynamic and learn from the variation in your daily balances. We just need to "operationalize" them.

          Thanks for jumping over to PH! Really appreciate our conversation and your support!! 🙏