I shipped GoHoardly - a budgeting app that starts your month on payday
Hi IH! I'm Károly, a developer from Hungary, and I just shipped my first app.
It started with a familiar moment: five days until payday and my account was basically empty. Where did it all go? Beer nights, a gym pass, subscriptions I barely used, the daily coffee. Money leaks through two channels: silent recurring bills, and small purchases that look insignificant on their own. I realized I simply didn't know where my money goes.
First I tracked everything in a spreadsheet. It worked, but fighting a spreadsheet on my phone at the checkout got old fast. So it became an app.
GoHoardly budgets by your paycheck, not the calendar: a budget period starts on payday and ends the day before the next one. Income is split into four buckets: Flow (a daily spending budget that grows as the period progresses - by day 17 of 30 you've unlocked 17/30 of it), Fixed (recurring bills), Extra (bigger purchases) and Savings (set aside each cycle, allocated to named goals). When you close a period, the unspent remainder carries over into the next period's Extra budget. A clean slate, with memory.
Most budgeting apps track what you already spent. I wanted something that helps you decide before you spend it.
My biggest takeaways from building it:
- AI can be your developer, but you must be the architect and the tester
- Choosing and understanding your stack is crucial (mine: Claude Code + React + Supabase + Vercel)
- Security is a must - pick solutions that can guarantee it
- Context is the key when working with AI
- Plan and document before you start prompting
I'd love feedback, especially on the onboarding - and I'm curious: does anyone else budget payday-to-payday instead of by calendar month?
The distinction I'd preserve is between tracking spending and shaping spending.
A lot of budgeting apps explain where the money went. Starting the budget on payday changes the decision before the money leaves your account, which feels like a fundamentally different job for the product.
That's a better way to put it than I managed in the post - "shaping" is exactly the job. The whole point of starting on payday is that the decision happens at the checkout, not in a report two weeks later. Mind if I use this phrasing? :)
Of course, feel free to use it.
Your reply also left me thinking about one consequence of that positioning that I'd rather explain in the context of your product than as a generic observation.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?