So, imagine you have spent over half of your monthly income in just a week, and you start wondering where the money went. At that point, you’re already cooked.
People often forget their income and expenses, usually because thinking about money is honestly very, very tiring. And why think about it when we can think about this beautiful life?
Ok, life might not be that beautiful, but at least you have to know where your money comes from and where it goes, so you can think twice before unconsciously buying an obscure Vertigo Swirls album while you still have unpaid rent.
But you don’t have to think about it all by yourself, because someone (or something) can help you with that.
Let me introduce Jack, a Telegram bot born specifically to remember your cashflow so you don’t have to.
Jack can do a lot of useful things:
- Save your transaction log, either spend or earn, safely.
- Get your transaction logs by today, specific date, or even a specific log ID.
- Very straightforward. No ads, no bloat, no slops, just Jack and you.
Also, he has been mentioned by Pink Floyd at least once.
You can check these with /help, but here's the commands anyway:
/spend <amount> <note>- log an expense./earn <amount> <note>- log income./today- show today’s transactions./getlog <id>- show a detailed transaction by its ID./help- show available commands and how to utilise Jack.
Money flow is a personal thing, and Jack and I know that. That’s why we want to be clear about how your transaction data is stored.
Jack stores your transaction data in a SQLite-compatible database. There are:
- No ads
- No trackers
- No third-party analytics
Your data exists solely to help you remember where your money went. Nothing more, nothing less.
Just to clear your mind, Jack is:
- NOT a budgeting app
- NOT a bank
- NOT a replacement for accounting software
- NOT interested in optimisation for scale
Jack exists to be small, personal, and honest.
The second reason I created Jack, besides using it as my personal cash tracker, is to learn Go. Because of that, you may find some rough edges in the codebase.
Contributions are more than welcome, whether that’s:
- cleaning up code,
- suggesting a small, well-scoped feature,
- improving structure,
- fixing bugs,
- or making the documentation less clunky than this README used to be.
That said, Jack is intentionally small and opinionated. If a feature makes things complicated, it probably doesn’t belong here.
Also, if you're feeling generous and want to help Jack and his creator stay hydrated, you can buy us a tea.
Wanna try to use Jack?
You can try it here on Telegram.
(Jack will make you dependent to him. Beware)
YEA I'M ALRIGHT JACK
KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF OF MY STACK
Dona nobis pacem.