Building an AI expense tracker that doesn't ask for your bank login
Hey Indie Hackers! đź‘‹ I am adding SmartWalt to the directory today and wanted to share the core problem we are tackling.
In personal finance apps, there is a massive friction point: you either spend 10 minutes a day manually typing out your expenses, or you surrender your highly sensitive bank login credentials to a syncing API like Plaid. For privacy-conscious users—or global users outside the US—the latter simply isn't an option.
So, we decided to use AI to bridge the gap. We built SmartWalt to give users the speed of automated syncing combined with the absolute privacy of manual entry.
The AI Features we built to replace bank-syncing:
🎙️ Voice Spend Tracking: Users can simply open the app and say, "Lunch $12." The AI instantly extracts the amount, assigns the correct category, and logs the date.
📸 Instant Receipt OCR: Snap a photo of any physical receipt, bill, or invoice. The AI reads the vendor, amount, and date in under 3 seconds, eliminating manual data entry.
🤖 Walt AI Coach: A built-in conversational financial assistant that monitors spending velocity, provides real-time budget warnings, and offers personalized insights.
Under the Hood: To make this fast enough that users actually prefer it over bank-syncing, latency had to be practically zero. We are running a Flutter mobile frontend connected to a FastAPI backend. The AI orchestration is handled by LangGraph and custom OCR pipelines running securely on AWS.
I’d love to hear from other builders here: Are any of you currently using AI to replace traditional third-party API integrations? How are you keeping your latency down when running multi-step AI workflows?
