🚀 Building ChatExpense: An AI-Powered Expense Tracker That Actually Understands You
"What if tracking expenses was as easy as chatting with a friend?"
That’s the question I asked myself before starting ChatExpense — a smart personal finance assistant that understands natural language, receipts, and even voice inputs.
💡 The Problem
Managing expenses is boring. Logging every coffee, bill, or grocery item takes time — and most apps out there feel like fancy spreadsheets with good UI. I wanted something conversational. Something... agentic.
🤖 Enter: ChatExpense
ChatExpense lets you:
- Log expenses via chat, voice, or receipt photos
- Auto-categorize and generate reports
- Ask questions like “How much did I spend on food last week?” or “What’s my biggest spending habit?”
- Get personalized tips on saving, budgeting, and patterns
It’s not just rule-based — it's powered by OpenAI, Whisper, and a LangGraph-style agentic workflow running on top of Django REST + PostgreSQL.
🎥 Demo Video (Watch it in action!)
👉 Watch the full feature demo: https://youtu.be/oOmMewFYTEA
This demo shows voice-based input, photo upload, chat queries, smart categories, and AI responses.
🛠️ Tech Stack:
- Backend: Django, Django REST Framework, async APIs
- Frontend: Streamlit (soon switching to Gradio/NextJS)
- LLM Engine: OpenAI (GPT-4o)
- Voice: OpenAI Whisper
- Image Parsing: OCR pipeline for receipt understanding
- Data Storage: PostgreSQL
- Deployment: Railway, with a cost-efficient container split
🔍 Challenges I Faced:
- Managing cost of AI inference with OpenAI usage-based billing
- Async Django APIs that play well with LLM back-and-forth messaging
- Token security (especially for chat sessions and user-specific data)
- Finding a way to merge chat UX with structured finance data
👷🏽 Build in Public: I Need Your Feedback!
ChatExpense is still in testing, and I’m giving 2 months of Power User access to testers who use it and send feedback.
📲 Test Android App:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.chatexpense.app
✍️ Sign up to become a tester:
https://forms.gle/dMcGKrCW4QKF6Vz76
💬 Join the Feedback Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1035231038196557
🌐 Visit Website:
https://chatexpense.com
🙏 How You Can Help
- If this sounds useful, I’d love if you:
- Try the app for a few days
- Send feedback (even one line)
- Share any bugs, UI quirks, or features you’d love to see
Also, if you’ve worked with AI agents or expense tracking — I’d love to hear how you tackled data structuring and context management. Let’s nerd out in the comments 👇
❤️ Let’s Make Expense Tracking Fun Again
Thanks for reading. I’m building ChatExpense to be helpful, not annoying.
Let’s turn boring budgeting into a conversation you actually enjoy.
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