Developer Launches Stoke Money, a Finance App Built Around Cash Flow Forecasting

In the post, the developer wrote that they had cycled through several finance trackers, starting with Personal Capital, then Monarch and most recently Copilot, and that none of them fit their needs. Their main complaint concerns how those apps treat cash flow: as the net sum of a month's transactions. Credit card charges are reported immediately but are usually deducted from checking accounts the following month, when the bill is due, so the developer said they had to keep a separate spreadsheet to track actual cash flow. They also objected to the emphasis on budgeting, saying their spending is rarely consistent month to month, which left them comparing justified spending against a budget and adjusting the budget until it passed.

Stoke Money keeps the usual components of a tracker, including accounts, transactions and categories, but the developer said the core is a cash flow projection engine that everything else is built around. Budgets are removed. Each income or spending category is projected forward from the user's historical activity rather than as a flat monthly figure, and lands in whichever account the user has historically used for it, such as a checking account for paychecks, rent and bills, or credit and debit cards for daily spending. Credit card payments are modeled automatically from the projected card balance, and users can set up recurring transfers between accounts to model savings.

The developer said the result is a forecast of how cash moves, letting a user see in advance when an account might run low. In their framing, if all accounts look healthy for the next 12 months, a user may not have a budgeting problem at all.

The feature the developer described as making the biggest difference personally is MCP integration, which they connected to Claude but say can be connected to any AI agent of the user's choice. They have asked it to import historical transactions by uploading PDF account statements, to categorize and tag all transactions made during a vacation, and to plan transfers across accounts to cover expected payments.

The developer said they hoped people who share their frustrations would find the app useful. As of the post's publication on Hacker News, it had received 5 points and no comments.

Editor's Summary Stoke Money is a personal finance app that drops budgeting in favor of projecting cash flow across accounts, modeling credit card payments automatically and supporting recurring transfers. Its developer built it after finding existing trackers misstated cash flow because card charges hit checking accounts only when bills come due. The app also connects to AI agents through MCP for importing PDF statements, categorizing transactions and planning transfers, though the launch post has drawn little response so far.