I’ve been working on a side project called Hunter Vault.
The idea started because I’ve been trying to track my expenses for years now but for some reason nothing really sticks. I found most budgeting apps useful, but pretty boring to keep using long term. You log an expense, update a budget, look at a chart, then close the app.
I wanted to try something different: what if managing your money felt more like progressing through a game?
A big inspiration was Solo Leveling, especially the idea of having a System that constantly shows your progress, gives you quests, and makes improvement visible.
So I started building that kind of progression around personal finance.
Instead of only seeing numbers and charts, Hunter Vault has XP, quests, achievements, streaks, titles, and ranks from E to S.
The idea is simple: your financial habits become your progression system.
Making personal finance feel like progression
I didn’t want to just put an RPG skin over an expense tracker.
The finance side still had to be useful on its own.
Right now Hunter Vault includes things like:
- expense and income tracking
- multiple accounts
- budgets and sub-categories
- bills and recurring transactions
- savings goals
- debt tracking
- Safe-to-Spend
- reports
- financial calculators
Then the RPG system sits on top of those features.
You complete quests, earn XP, unlock achievements and slowly increase your rank as you work on your finances.
One thing I’ve learned is that gamification gets annoying pretty quickly if users have to do extra pointless work just to earn XP.
At first, I thought I could simply reward people whenever they logged an expense.
But that doesn’t really make sense.
Someone logging 20 expenses isn’t necessarily doing better financially than someone logging five.
So I’ve been changing the progression system to reward useful behaviors instead: staying consistent, setting up a budget, working toward savings goals, paying down debt, reviewing spending and completing financial quests.
That part is still evolving.
Eventually, I want Hunter Vault to feel like you’re developing a financial character over months or years, instead of just watching an XP bar increase.
The technical side
Hunter Vault started as a web app and is now available on iOS and Android as well.
The main stack is:
React + TypeScript + Capacitor
For local data, I use IndexedDB with Dexie.
One of my goals from the start was making the core app work offline instead of requiring a constant connection just to check your finances.
I also use Firebase and Supabase for parts of the backend and cloud functionality.
Building a finance app has made me much more careful about things that normally seem like small bugs.
A UI glitch is annoying.
An incorrect account balance is much worse.
Things like transfers, recurring transactions, debt payments, budget calculations and account balances have to stay consistent or users immediately lose trust in the app.
Because of that, a lot of my recent work has actually been on the less exciting parts: fixing edge cases, improving tablet layouts, localization, transaction handling and making the overall experience more reliable.
Logging every expense is still a problem
This is probably the biggest problem I personally have with expense tracking apps.
Even after building my own, manually entering every transaction gets tiring.
If you spend several times throughout the day, eventually you start thinking:
I’ll log these later.
And then “later” becomes never.
So one of the features I’m working on right now is Smart Import.
The idea is to let someone upload a screenshot, receipt or bank/account statement and have Hunter Vault extract the transactions automatically.
Instead of manually entering 30 transactions from a statement, you could upload it, review what was detected and import the ones you want.
I don’t want full bank syncing right now.
I prefer keeping it user-controlled: you provide the document, the app extracts the transactions, and you decide what actually gets imported.
I’m still working through things like duplicate detection, category suggestions, different statement formats and making sure users can verify everything before anything touches their financial records.
I’m also building an AI financial assistant
Another feature I’ve started working on is Huntee.
Huntee is an AI financial advisor/assistant inside Hunter Vault.
I don’t want it to just be another chatbot where you ask generic questions like “How do I save money?”
The more interesting idea is allowing it to understand the context of your actual Hunter Vault data.
For example, you might eventually be able to ask:
How much can I safely spend this weekend?
Why did I spend more this month?
Which category is hurting my budget the most?
If I keep paying my debt at this rate, when will I finish?
Can I afford this purchase without affecting my goals?
The goal is for Huntee to explain your finances in normal language instead of making you interpret multiple charts yourself.
I’m being careful with this because AI giving financial guidance can easily become overconfident.
For me, Huntee should be more of an assistant that helps users understand their own data, rather than something that pretends to know exactly what someone should do with their money.
Building the app is easier than getting people to find it
This is something I underestimated.
As a developer, my natural response whenever growth is slow is:
Maybe I should build another feature.
Then I open the codebase again.
But after working on Hunter Vault for a while, I’m realizing another feature doesn’t matter much if nobody knows the app exists.
So I’ve been forcing myself to spend more time outside the codebase too: SEO, writing, App Store optimization, talking to users, social posts and sharing what I’ve learned while building.
That’s also why I’m posting this here.
What I’m working on next
The biggest things on my list right now are:
Smart Import — extract transactions from screenshots and bank/account statements.
Huntee — an AI assistant that can help users understand their finances using their Hunter Vault data.
I’m also continuing to improve the web experience, cloud features and the RPG progression itself.
There’s still a lot I want to do with the Solo Leveling-inspired System idea too.
I’d like Hunter Vault to eventually feel less like:
finance app + some XP
and more like an actual progression system for your financial life.
I’m still figuring out what that should look like without making the app overly complicated.
If you work on personal finance apps, local-first software, AI features or gamification, I’d be interested to hear how you approach these problems.
And I’m especially curious about one thing:
Would a Solo Leveling-style progression system actually make you more consistent with managing money, or would you rather keep the finance and game elements separate?
