I Built a Free Expense Tracker Because I Was Terrible With Money

Bishnu Saha — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:26:06 +0000

I used to check my bank balance at the end of every month and just stare at it.

Good salary. Nothing saved. No idea where it went.

I tried spreadsheets. I tried Mint. I tried YNAB. Every app was either too complex, too expensive, or just not something I'd actually open every day.

So I built my own.

What is Spendly?
Spendly is a free, clean monthly expense tracker built for people who just want to know where their money goes — without learning a new system.

No bank account linking. No subscription. No complexity.

Just: open it, add an expense, close it.

Live: https://spendly.it.com

What it does
Add and categorize daily expenses in seconds
Set a monthly budget and track it in real time
Visual donut chart — breakdown by category
Cycle history bars — compare spending month over month
Savings goals tracker
Dark mode
Works on any device — no installation needed

Tech stack

Frontend — React + Vite, deployed on Vercel

Backend — Node.js + Express + Prisma, deployed on Render

Database — PostgreSQL via Supabase

Auth — JWT stored in localStorage

The hardest bug I fixed
The most frustrating bug was a timezone mismatch in production.

My cycle helper was using local time methods (new Date(year, month, day)) on the client. But the server runs in UTC. So when I was in IST (UTC+5:30), the client sent a cycleStart ISO string that the server mis-parsed into the previous month — returning zero expenses every time.

Fix: use UTC methods everywhere (getUTCFullYear, getUTCMonth, Date.UTC()) on both client and server.

Lesson: always use UTC in production. Local time will betray you.

What I learned building this
Free tiers (Vercel + Render + Supabase) are genuinely powerful for solo projects
Render cold starts on free tier are real — first load takes 30-50 seconds
Prisma auto-camelCases column names — monthly_budget becomes monthlyBudget in JS
Building for yourself first makes product decisions 10x easier

What's next
Mobile app (React Native)
Recurring expenses
Export to CSV
Email summary every month

Try it
https://spendly.it.com

It's completely free. No ads. No premium tier. No credit card.

I'm at about 10 users right now and genuinely want honest feedback — what would make you actually use an expense tracker every single day?

Drop a comment — I read every one.

DEV Community: Bishnu Saha

I Built a Free Expense Tracker Because I Was Terrible With Money

Tech stack