Build a private spending tracker that reads your bank emails each night
Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet
For: Non-coders who want to track spending without sharing data with an app
Fahad Hasin calls himself close to a non-coder, yet he got Claude Code to make a money tracker running on a spare Raspberry Pi 5. It gathers bank alert emails from several accounts, sorts spending into categories with a small local Llama model, and adds detail from merchant emails. A nightly job runs it with no manual steps. He admits he cannot judge the code quality.
Steps
- Pick a small always-on computer you already own, such as a Raspberry Pi.
- Ask Claude Code to read only the bank alert emails, not your whole inbox.
- Use a local model for sorting so transactions stay on your own device.
- Check the categories each week, since small mistakes can slip in.
- Ask someone who codes to look over it if you cannot judge the code yourself.
Starter prompt
Help me build a personal spending tracker that runs on my [device]. It should read only bank alert emails from [bank email addresses], pull out date, amount and merchant, and sort each into categories: [categories]. Use a local model so no transaction data leaves my device. Explain each part in plain English. Test it on [number] sample emails first and show me the results. Do not ask me to paste my email password here. Tell me the safe way to connect it.
Original post: Substack · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.