Meli: A spending tracker for Mac designed with privacy in mind. Turns credit card alert emails into spending insights and budgets. I was in security for 15+ years and I built it because I didn't want to use Plaid or other aggregators and wanted my financial data locally on my device and not in the cloud. Spreadsheets required a lot of work to maintain so I wanted some sort of automation. Connects directly to your email (reads only alerts from supported senders) and all parsing happens on your device.

Works with seven major US banks (AMEX, Capital One, Chase, Citi, Discover, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) plus PayPal and Venmo.

Does this list cover most of your spending? If not, which banks or cards would you need?

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BrandiATMuhkuh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Like 2h ago I was doing some research on that topic. I’ve heard about open banking a while back and thought: Oh that’s easy. I’ll just get an api key from my bank or “oath” into it. Sadly it’s not that easy.

How do you get programmatic access to your data?

	▲	alphax314 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately it's not easy. In the US specifically banks don't generally offer APIs or keys to access them to individuals and you have to go through an aggregator like Plaid (which is what I want to avoid). However, most banks do send alert emails when something is charged to a credit/debit card. Meli connects to your inbox read-only via OAuth (Google and Microsoft) or IMAP for other providers and reads those emails on your Mac. Of course there are limitations to this approach, you only get access to the data that is available in those emails like merchant, amount, date and account. Which banks are you interested in? Are you based in the US?