I'm a financial analyst who couldn't manage his own money. So I built the budgeting tool that was missing.

I know how that sounds. I work with financial data professionally — and for years, I couldn't keep my own household budget together for more than two months in a row.

It wasn't for lack of trying. I went through all the "major" apps. They all do roughly the same thing — connect to your bank via Plaid, auto-categorize everything, give you charts. Sounds great on paper. In practice, two things kept happening:

The auto-categorization wasn't done the way I'd like. I didn't get any "actionable insights" at the micro-level from the fancy charts. And because everything was automated, I'd stop checking in. The app was "handling it." Except it wasn't — it was just collecting data I wasn't looking at.

So I'd go back to spreadsheets. Download my bank's CSV, build formulas, categorize manually. This actually worked — I understood where every dollar went. But it took time I didn't have. One busy month and I'd fall behind. Two months and I'd give up. Then start the whole cycle over.

No one had built the middle ground. You either hand your bank credentials to an app and let it do everything (badly), or you open a blank spreadsheet and do everything yourself (unsustainably).

So I started building OpBoard.io

What it does:

You export a CSV from your bank (every US bank lets you do this — takes 30 seconds). You drag it into OpBoard. It uses AI-suggested keywords to auto-categorize your transactions into your expense categories.

But here's the key difference: you define the keywords. You control the categories. You see every transaction and can override anything. The AI suggests — you decide. Next month, when you import again, your keywords remember everything. The more you use it, the less work there is.

No bank login. No Plaid. No one touches your accounts.

Why I think this works:

Budgeting apps fail because they remove you from the process. Spreadsheets fail because they dump the entire process on you. OpBoard automates the tedious part (pattern matching transactions to categories) while keeping you in the loop on everything else.

I've been using it myself for months and it's the first time I've actually stayed consistent. If you've been through the app-spreadsheet-give-up cycle, you know that's not a low bar.

Where it's at:

Live at opboard.io. Free beta — no credit card. Solo founder, built nights and weekends with Next.js and Supabase.

It's probably not going to replace YNAB for people who love YNAB. But if you wanted spreadsheet control without spreadsheet maintenance — or you just don't want to give Plaid your bank password — You'll find it useful.

Would love feedback from this community. Beta key: OPBETA-PH-50