You start the month thinking you’ll save money, but somehow, by the end of it, you’re left wondering — “Where did all my money go?”
Between food, shopping, subscriptions, travel, and those small purchases that seem harmless at the time, keeping track of your spending can get surprisingly difficult.
That’s why I built SpendWise AI — a smart personal finance assistant designed to help you understand where your money is going and make better spending decisions.
🤝 Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission
This is my submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend.
The Problem
Managing money sounds simple until you actually start doing it.
Between daily expenses, subscriptions, food, shopping, and unexpected purchases, it can become difficult to understand where your money is really going.
Most expense trackers show you numbers and charts — but they don't always help you understand what those numbers mean.
So I wanted to build something a little more useful.
💡 Meet SpendWise AI
SpendWise AI is a personal finance assistant that helps users understand their spending and get AI-powered insights from their financial data.
The goal was simple:
Don't just track your expenses. Understand them.
Instead of manually analyzing spending patterns, users can use AI to turn their financial data into easier-to-understand insights and suggestions.
👥** Who is it for?**
I built SpendWise AI especially with students and young adults in mind.
When you're managing your own money for the first time, it can be difficult to know:
- Where most of your money is going
- Which spending habits are unnecessary
- How your expenses are changing
- What you could potentially save
- What your spending data actually means
SpendWise AI tries to make that process simpler.
🧠 Where AI Comes In
AI is at the core of the application.
Instead of treating expenses as just rows of numbers, SpendWise AI uses an AI-powered workflow to analyze the user's financial information and provide more understandable insights.
The idea is to make interacting with financial data feel more natural — rather than requiring users to manually interpret every chart or category.
🛠️ How I Built It
The project uses a React-based frontend with a Node.js backend, with AI integrated into the application through the backend.
Tech Stack
⚛️ React
🟢 Node.js
🚀 Express
🎨 Tailwind CSS
🤖 AI integration
📊 Financial data analysis
🔐 Environment-based API configuration
The frontend communicates with the backend through API requests, while sensitive API credentials stay on the server side rather than being exposed in the frontend.
🎥 Demo
Here's a short walkthrough of SpendWise AI:
drive.google.com
The demo shows the application flow and how the AI-powered functionality works.
🔗 Source Code
The complete project is available on GitHub:https://github.com/gomezonic/spendwise-ai
SpendWise AI — GitHub
🌱 Why Open Innovation Matters
One of the things I like about open-source development is that you don't have to build everything from scratch.
You can learn from existing projects, experiment with new technologies, combine different tools, and build something useful for a real problem.
For SpendWise AI, the challenge was not just to add an AI feature, but to think about how AI could actually make a common task easier for someone using the application.
🚀 What's Next?
There are still a lot of things I would like to improve:
- Better personalized financial recommendations
- More detailed spending analytics
- Improved budgeting features
- More AI-powered financial insights
- Better data visualization
- More testing and refinement This is just the beginning of SpendWise AI.
Final Thought
I built SpendWise AI around a simple idea:
Your financial data should help you make better decisions — not just tell you what you already spent.
Thanks for checking out my project! ❤️
I'd love to hear what features you'd want in a personal finance assistant.
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