I built a multilingual personal finance app — here's what I learned shipping in two languages from day one
Most budgeting apps are built for a single market. After struggling to find one
that worked well regardless of language, I built PatrimoinePlus — a personal
finance tracker available in French and English, designed for anyone who wants
to take control of their money.
What it does:
- Budget tracking by category (envelope method, 50/30/20, zero-based)
- Receipt scanning with AI OCR
- Net worth tracking across accounts, real estate, and investments
- Savings goals
- Full French and English UI with seamless language switching
Stack: Next.js 16, Supabase, Stripe, Vercel
Biggest challenge so far: Bilingual SEO. Implementing hreflang correctly
with next-intl took several iterations — and personal finance content remains
surprisingly underserved outside of English.
Pricing: Free tier + €5.99/month or €49.99/year premium
Would love feedback from other indie hackers — especially on pricing,
onboarding, and converting users across different markets.
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I loved the Free Budget Planning Tools feature
much useful tool for me
If I could make changes once I made the planning It would be much better
The non-English finance content gap is a real opportunity. I build tools for small business bookkeeping and even within English, the moment you move outside the US (different date formats, different CSV delimiters, different tax categories), most tools just break.
On the receipt scanning — how are you handling the localization of expense categories? That's one of the trickiest parts of multilingual finance tools. A 'grocery' category maps cleanly between languages, but tax-relevant categories (like distinguishing deductible business meals from personal dining in France vs the US) are where it gets messy.
Re: pricing — I'd echo the other commenter about the monthly being slightly high for a budgeting app audience. One thing that worked well for me: offering a generous free tier that handles the basic use case, then gating the 'power' features (receipt scanning, multi-account net worth) behind premium. People who need those features are much less price-sensitive than someone who just wants to track expenses.
the bilingual SEO challnge is real, we deal with something similar with our iOS apps. not multi-language per se but multi-market - trying to rank for completley different keywords in different app stores is a nightmare
the "personal finance content is underserved outside english" observation is super interesting tho. thats actally a huge moat if u think about it. all the big budgeting apps are english-first and theyr too lazy to properly localize. if u nail the french market u basically have no competiton
on pricing - i think the yearly plan at 49.99 is smart but the monthly at 5.99 might be a bit high for a budgeting app where ppl are literally tryng to save money lol. maybe consider a lower monthly with a bigger gap to annual to push annual conversons? we do something simlar with our apps and the annual conversion rate went way up
the receipt scanning with AI OCR is a nice differentiator btw. most indie finance apps skip that becuase its hard to build. props for shipping it from day one
how are u handling the french market distribution? just ASO or doing content marketing in french too?