Can Finary be vibe coded?
Aggregates bank accounts, brokerages, crypto and real estate into one net worth and asset allocation dashboard.
The dashboard half of Finary is a focused project: a table of holdings, a price fetcher, a few charts, a history table so you can see net worth over time. The hard half is the plumbing, connecting to hundreds of European banks and brokers through PSD2 aggregators, which needs either a licensed provider or a lot of scraping you do not want to maintain. You can get most of the way with CSV imports from your broker plus public price APIs for equities and crypto, refreshed on a cron. That gets you honest numbers with a monthly chore attached. If the chore is the reason you were paying, this is not a replacement.
Jump to the build brief ↓Legacy-calibrated assessment
Checked Aug 2026
What you pay today, before any DIY hosting
medium editorial confidence
Tracked separately from the pricing check
Buildability by layer
Screens, forms, and focused interactions
The repeatable job the product performs
Availability and legality of required data
Uptime, queues, support, and maintenance
Security, compliance, and user confidence
The achievable core
- A local dashboard that tracks manually entered or CSV imported holdings, refreshes prices from public APIs, and charts net worth and allocation over time.
- Import transactions, categorize spending, and forecast cash flow privately.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.
The parts a prompt cannot buy
- Automatic bank and broker sync across hundreds of institutions
- Mobile apps with push updates and Face ID
- Automated real estate valuation estimates and loan tracking
- Benchmarking against other users and the community and content layer
- Connectors, OAuth flows, and vendor API changes require constant upkeep.
- Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
Build, switch, or keep paying
Narrower, with trade-offs
A local dashboard that tracks manually entered or CSV imported holdings, refreshes prices from public APIs, and charts net worth and allocation over time.
Use the build brief ↓No checked option yet
Compare the prior art below or build only the workflow you need.
$14.50/mo
Because nobody actually keeps a spreadsheet updated for two years. Finary's pitch is that you connect once and then your net worth is just correct every morning, including the accounts you forget about, and that only works if someone maintains regulated connections to your specific bank in your specific country. The DIY build is honest and private and free, but it asks you for fifteen minutes of CSV wrangling a month, and most people quietly stop doing that around month three.
Visit Finary ↗Why people still pay
Because nobody actually keeps a spreadsheet updated for two years. Finary's pitch is that you connect once and then your net worth is just correct every morning, including the accounts you forget about, and that only works if someone maintains regulated connections to your specific bank in your specific country. The DIY build is honest and private and free, but it asks you for fifteen minutes of CSV wrangling a month, and most people quietly stop doing that around month three.
Connectors, OAuth flows, and vendor API changes require constant upkeep.
Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
The last 20 percent is sync, migration fidelity, speed, and edge cases.
The brief
Context, requirements, acceptance criteria, non-goals, and the full production standard — as Markdown, ready for any coding agent.
Build brief — a focused alternative to Finary
Context
Finary — Aggregates bank accounts, brokerages, crypto and real estate into one net worth and asset allocation dashboard. It currently costs $14.50/mo.
The dashboard half of Finary is a focused project: a table of holdings, a price fetcher, a few charts, a history table so you can see net worth over time. The hard half is the plumbing, connecting to hundreds of European banks and brokers through PSD2 aggregators, which needs either a licensed provider or a lot of scraping you do not want to maintain. You can get most of the way with CSV imports from your broker plus public price APIs for equities and crypto, refreshed on a cron. That gets you honest numbers with a monthly chore attached. If the chore is the reason you were paying, this is not a replacement.
This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of Finary that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest.
What you are building
A local dashboard that tracks manually entered or CSV imported holdings, refreshes prices from public APIs, and charts net worth and allocation over time.
Import transactions, categorize spending, and forecast cash flow privately.
A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.
Requirements
Functional
Node 20 and a machine that can run a cron job or scheduled task.
CSV exports or manual entry for each account you hold.
Manual valuations for illiquid assets like property.
Data and integrations
A free crypto price API key and a source for equity and ETF quotes.
Each of these needs a real account, credential, or quota. Set them up before writing feature code.
Non-functional
Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.
Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle.
Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down.
Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it.
Implementation brief
Build a local personal net worth tracker. Single user, runs on my machine, no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.
Stack, non negotiable: Next.js 15 with the App Router and TypeScript, Tailwind for styling, SQLite through better-sqlite3 with plain SQL migrations in /db, Recharts for charts. No ORM, no auth library, no external UI kit.
Data model:
accounts: id, name, institution, type (cash, brokerage, retirement, crypto, property, loan), currency
holdings: id, account_id, symbol (nullable), quantity, manual_value (nullable), cost_basis (nullable)
prices: symbol, date, close, currency
snapshots: date, total_value, breakdown_json
Features:
1. CRUD pages for accounts and holdings. Holdings are either priced by symbol or carry a manual value for things like property and cash.
2. CSV import at /import: paste or upload a CSV, map columns to symbol, quantity, cost basis, pick the target account, preview before commit.
3. A price refresh route that pulls crypto quotes from CoinGecko and equity or ETF quotes from a single configurable HTTP quote endpoint. Cache into the prices table, never hit the network on page render.
4. A snapshot script, npm run snapshot, that recomputes total net worth and writes one row to snapshots. Document how to run it daily with cron or Task Scheduler.
5. Dashboard: total net worth, net worth line chart from snapshots, allocation donut by asset type, table of holdings with value, weight, and gain versus cost basis.
6. Multi currency: store a base currency in .env, fetch FX rates in the same refresh job, convert everything to base for display.
Out of scope, do not attempt: bank or broker account linking, open banking or PSD2 aggregators, credential scraping, mobile apps, multi user support, tax reporting.
Secrets in .env.example: BASE_CURRENCY, COINGECKO_API_KEY, QUOTE_API_URL, QUOTE_API_KEY, FX_API_URL. Never commit real keys.
Seed the database with three fake accounts and eight holdings so the dashboard is not empty on first run. Write a README with setup, refresh, and snapshot instructions in under thirty lines.
Delivery standard
Inspect the repository first, then write a short implementation plan before writing code.
Deliver the smallest complete end-to-end workflow first; every primary control must work against persisted data.
Use real validation and storage; never substitute fake dashboards, decorative controls, hard-coded success states, or mock integrations.
Include responsive layouts plus genuine empty, loading, success, validation, and failure states.
Keep secrets server-side in environment variables, provide .env.example, and never commit credentials or user data.
Add structured logs around every external call and return actionable errors without leaking sensitive details.
Write unit tests for the core logic and one automated test of the main user journey.
Finish with a README covering setup, architecture, data location, backups, tests, deployment, and known limitations.
Acceptance criteria
A clean install starts the app using only the README and .env.example.
The primary journey works from first visit through saved result, reload, edit, export, and deletion where applicable.
Invalid input, missing configuration, provider failure, and an empty database each have a usable state.
The interface works at 390px and 1440px, is keyboard navigable, and shows visible focus on every control.
Tests, type checking, linting, and a production build all pass with no ignored failures.
No part of the interface implies a live integration, security guarantee, or scale capability that was not actually built and verified.
Non-goals
Do not build these, and do not claim to have replaced them:
Automatic bank and broker sync across hundreds of institutions.
Mobile apps with push updates and Face ID.
Automated real estate valuation estimates and loan tracking.
Benchmarking against other users and the community and content layer.
Someone else fixing the connector the day your bank changes its API.
What you still own after launch
Secure credentials, rotate secrets, and handle provider rate limits.
Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.
Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.
Risk
High consequence. Use this as a prototype or personal aid. Keep a qualified human and an established provider in the loop for consequential decisions.
Editorial confidence in this assessment: medium. No reviewed project implementation is linked yet.
Generated by Can It Be Vibe Coded? · Full report: https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/finary
You still own the product
- Secure credentials, rotate secrets, and handle provider rate limits.
- Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
- Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
- Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.
- Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.
Projects built from this idea
No reviewed implementation has been linked for Finary yet. A submission is evidence for review, not automatic proof that the whole product was replaced.
Built a version of Finary?Submit the project as evidence for this report.
Before you start
Can Finary be vibe coded?
Partly, if you narrow it. The dashboard half of Finary is a focused project: a table of holdings, a price fetcher, a few charts, a history table so you can see net worth over time. The hard half is the plumbing, connecting to hundreds of European banks and brokers through PSD2 aggregators, which needs either a licensed provider or a lot of scraping you do not want to maintain. You can get most of the way with CSV imports from your broker plus public price APIs for equities and crypto, refreshed on a cron. That gets you honest numbers with a monthly chore attached. If the chore is the reason you were paying, this is not a replacement.
What can an AI coding agent reproduce from Finary?
A local dashboard that tracks manually entered or CSV imported holdings, refreshes prices from public APIs, and charts net worth and allocation over time. Import transactions, categorize spending, and forecast cash flow privately. A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.
What will a DIY Finary replacement still be missing?
Automatic bank and broker sync across hundreds of institutions; Mobile apps with push updates and Face ID; Automated real estate valuation estimates and loan tracking; Benchmarking against other users and the community and content layer; Connectors, OAuth flows, and vendor API changes require constant upkeep.; Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
What do I still own after building a Finary alternative?
Secure credentials, rotate secrets, and handle provider rate limits. Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates. Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change. Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss. Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.