FoundMoney

Not another budget app! Every tool in this space frames money as a yes/no judgment — can you afford this, did you overspend. FoundMoney asks a different question: what are you already spending that you'd rather spend on whatever else instead?

The idea is "the money was already there, I just couldn't see it." Think of it as a discovery tool. I've approached categorization and recurring spend, nice-to-have, need-to-have in a novel way, and I read every bit of feedback to continuously improve!

Categorization is the hard part

The hard part isn't the interface, it's categorization. Transaction descriptions from PDFs and images fight normalization — direct API is easy. Purchase info gets truncated or glued together, and every statement is slightly different across institutions.

So classification runs as a confidence-gated ladder rather than one model: curated dictionary first, then personal-finance category at high confidence, then a keyword kit, then legacy rules, then low-confidence, then honestly unknown. Nothing gets a category it hasn't earned.

Merchant grouping separates exact recurring charges from recurring merchants from occasional and one-time spend, because "you spend $44.81/month on coffee" and "you bought a couch once" are different facts and shouldn't be summed.

Categories are local. HYPER local, even.

The first merchant pack is Hudson Valley, NY — because I live here, and it's great — since national dictionaries confidently mislabel the places people actually spend money. Local coffee shops. Chocolatier (just me?). Bakery (ok, a lot of food). Local summer camps.

I feel really great about growing this out, and your input can help!