The personal finance ecosystem is flooded with personal finance platforms. I've tried many of them, but every single one of them had deal-breakers I couldn't work with. I've been using Microsoft Money since 1994 to manage my finances, and wanted something that could replace it. My perfect product to replace MS Money needed the following features:

* Must support all types of banking and investment types, including:
   * Chequing
   * Savings
   * Credit Cards
   * Loans
   * Mortgages
   * Line of Credit
   * Brokerage accounts
   * Asset accounts
* Must support importing from QIF (the only export option available for MS Money)
* Must be self-hostable via containerization
* Must support multiple currencies
* Must support pulling currency exchange rates and stock prices on a regular basis
* Must support PostgreSQL for the backend tables
* Must have a usable mobile app or web interface

A few months ago, I upgraded to a Claude Max+ account for work purposes. I work for a web-based software company in a product management capacity, but am not a developer. It was working amazingly well for my work use-case, so I had the bright idea to attempt to create a Microsoft Money replacement.

I finally decided to try my hand at creating my own platform that met all my criteria by using "vibe-coding", which is a dirty word in the self-hosting community. I just wanted to see what was possible with the current state of AI. It turned out to be more successful than I ever could have imagined. I'm able to do exactly what I do at work, which is to describe what I want a particular feature to look like and hand it off to the development team to implement. I review the results, request fixes or modifications and send it back to the team when necessary. Except in my case, Claude Code does in minutes what takes our development team weeks.

Its worked so well that I've fully retired MS Money in favour of it, which is why I'm making [Monize](https://github.com/kenlasko/monize) available for others.

It's designed to be self-hosted and is fully multi-user capable. I'm running it in my home-based Kubernetes cluster, but it will function fine via Docker. I've taken great pains to make sure its secure and performs well, even though I'm not capable of truly understanding the codebase (which sounds like an oxymoron but Monize has passed every security audit I've thrown at it so far).

* [Github Repo](https://github.com/kenlasko/monize)
* [Full Demo Site](https://monize-demo.ucdialplans.com)
* [Wiki](https://github.com/kenlasko/monize/wiki)

I do have a self-created and managed website for [Teams dialplan creation](https://www.ucdialplans.com) that I've been running for over 15 years, which gives me a fair-bit of experience in providing services for a long period. However, I don't have any immediate plans on providing a hosted version of Monize. The data is not encrypted at the database level and while I'm sure Claude Code could tackle that aspect, its not a path I'm willing to go down right now. Having to store other people's most important financial information gives me the willies, not to mention the legal ramifications of things like GDPR and similar.

Having said all that, have a go at [Monize](https://github.com/kenlasko/monize). Feedback is always welcome. I'm especially interested in what other developers might think of this.

Monize - Personal Finance Manager