I Built a Tool to Explain My Spending — Worth Building? ( Need honest feedbacks )
I Built a Tool to Explain My Spending — Now I’m Deciding Whether to Build It Fully
I track my expenses.
I’ve tried multiple finance apps.
And yet, I still couldn’t answer a simple question:
“What does my spending actually say about my habits?”
Most tools are great at showing what you spent — charts, categories, timelines.
Very few help you understand what it means.
So I built a small experiment called Explain My Wallet.
Not a full product.
Not a polished app.
A validation build.
The idea
Instead of dashboards and charts, this tool focuses on explanation-first insights.
You upload transaction data → it explains your spending in plain English:
- patterns you repeat
- blind spots you ignore
- habits you may not realize you have
Think less finance tracker
and more a smart friend explaining your money back to you.
Important context (being transparent)
This is not fully built — intentionally.
Right now, the goal isn’t revenue or growth.
It’s answering one hard question:
Is this worth building at all?
I didn’t want to spend months polishing something that solves the wrong problem.
What I’m trying to validate
Here’s what I’m genuinely unsure about:
- Do people actually want explanations, or are charts enough?
- Where’s the line between helpful insight and creepy analysis?
- Is this a one-time “money clarity” tool, or something people would revisit?
- What single feature would make this undeniably useful?
I’m not looking for polite encouragement.
I’m looking for signal.
Current state
- Early version
- Limited scope
- No fancy flows
- No monetization yet
Just enough functionality to spark real reactions.
👉 Live here: https://explainmywallet.vercel.app/
Why I’m sharing this on Indie Hackers
This community understands something important:
Killing an idea early is also progress.
If the feedback says:
- “This is unnecessary” → I’ll drop it.
- “This solves a real pain” → I’ll double down and build properly.
Either outcome is a win.
What I’d love feedback on
If you’ve built, validated, or killed products before, I’d really value your thoughts:
- Would you use something like this?
- What would stop you from trusting it?
- How would you personally scope a v1 for this idea?
This post is part of my build in public process.
Appreciate any honest feedback — good or bad.
Tags (optional)
#buildinpublic #validation #fintech #productthinking
This is a really clean framing of a validation build 👍
One thought from experience: the explanation-first angle feels strongest when it drives a decision, not just awareness.
Example: “Because you spend X like this, here’s one concrete change that would save you ₹/$Y next month.”
On your question about charts vs explanations — I’ve seen people want charts for trust and explanations for action. The combo matters.
Curious: did any early user say “this changed what I did next” vs “this was interesting”?
Hey Harsh, really appreciate you taking the time to write this out.
The decision vs awareness framing is honestly the most useful thing I've heard on this idea so far. That question about 'changed what I did next' is now how I'll measure if v1 is working. Thanks for this.
I like the framing around explanation first rather than more charts, even though I’m probably not the target user for this. For people who don’t naturally reason from numbers, having patterns explained back to them could be genuinely useful.
I think the interesting part here isn’t the explanation itself, but what problem the explanation is meant to address. Showing patterns and habits is helpful, but it naturally raises the question of “toward what?” Better savings, different priorities, reduced impulse spending, or simply awareness. That distinction matters for how the product is perceived, not as a requirement, but as context.
Because of that, the boundary between reflection and guidance feels important. Once a tool moves from description into interpretation and implied advice, it enters trust, liability, and ethical territory. That is not a reason to avoid the idea, but it does seem central to how it should be scoped and communicated.
The main thing that would stop me personally is trust. Uploading raw transaction data raises immediate security and privacy questions, and without very clear guarantees it’s hard to get past that. The value here also seems to depend heavily on specificity, so avoiding insights that feel generic or overly interpretive would likely be critical.
Hey DeepSpan, this took real thought to write and I genuinely appreciate it.
The 'toward what?' question caught me off guard in a good way. I realized I'd been thinking about the explanation as the end goal, when really it needs to point somewhere. My instinct now is to narrow it to impulse spending clarity specifically not full budgeting, not savings goals, just surfacing the habits people don't realize they have.
The trust and liability point is something I'll think hard about before building further. You're right that once the tool moves from describing to interpreting, it enters different territory. I hadn't framed it that cleanly before reading your comment.
And on the data upload concern, totally fair. The version I shared was honestly more of a UI concept than a live product. I held back on fully building it partly because of this exact wall. No point engineering something people won't actually use.
Thanks for not just being polite about it ,this is the kind of feedback that actually changes how I think about the build.