Streams

Streams is a personal finance app that lives on your own computer. You drop in your monthly bank statements, and it turns them into a clear picture of your money: where it went, what’s coming up, and what to do next. Your data never leaves your machine, and if you want an AI to help, you connect your own Claude or ChatGPT.

Why I’m building it

I spend my days in finance, but my own money still lived in scattered statements and a half-finished spreadsheet. The best budgeting apps are built for US banks and want ongoing access to your accounts. I wanted something that works with any Australian bank, costs nothing to run, and keeps my data mine.

The problem: most people avoid looking at their money because it feels stressful, and most apps make it feel like an audit. The approach: local-first and statement-based, with AI that only sees summaries, never your raw transactions. It borrows the best ideas from apps like YNAB, Monarch and Rocket Money, designed to feel as calm as Notion. What’s next: smarter subscription detection, goals that show where “future you” lands, and a one-click desktop app.

What I’ve learned so far

Constraints make better products. Having no backend forced every decision to be simpler, and keeping the AI on summaries only turned out to be a feature, not a limitation. The other lesson is that trust in finance comes from checking: every imported statement has to reconcile to the cent before it’s saved, and that one rule matters more than any chart.