{"slug": "show-hn-stoke-money-personal-finance-app-built-around-a-cash-flow-forecast", "title": "Show HN: Stoke Money – Personal finance app built around a cash flow forecast", "summary": "A developer launched Stoke Money, a personal finance app built around a cash flow projection engine rather than budgets, and integrated it with Anthropic's Claude through MCP so an AI agent can import PDF account statements, categorize transactions, and plan transfers. The app projects each income and spending category forward from historical activity into the accounts where the money historically lands, models credit card payments automatically from projected balances, and forecasts cash movement up to 12 months ahead. The launch post on Hacker News drew 1 point and 0 comments.", "body_md": "Hi HN,\n\nI've been through many finance tracking apps, starting with Personal Capital, then Monarch, and most recently Copilot. None of them have worked perfectly for my needs.\n\nAll of these apps tend to model “cash flow” as the net sum of your transactions during a month, yet while credit card charges are reported immediately, they are typically deducted from checking (cash) accounts the following month when the bill is due. As a result, I've always had to maintain a separate spreadsheet to track my actual cash flow.\n\nThese apps also have a huge focus on managing budgets, which has never been for me. My spending is rarely consistent month-to-month, so every month I'm comparing my fully justified spending against my budget, and tweaking my budget until I “pass”.\n\nSo I built yet another finance tracking app. It has the usual components - accounts, transactions, categories - but the core is a cash flow projection engine, and everything else is built around it.\n\nBudgets are gone. Instead, each income/spending category is projected forward from your historical activity, but not as a flat monthly number. They land in whatever account you historically use (e.g. checking account for paychecks/rent/bills, credit/debit cards for daily spending). Credit card payments are modeled automatically based on your projected credit card balance. You can set up your own recurring transfers between accounts as well, to model savings, for example.\n\nThe end result is that the app can forecast how your cash moves, and you can see in advance when any account might run low. If all of your accounts look good for the next 12 months, maybe you don't have a budgeting problem.\n\nWhat’s made the biggest difference for me has been the MCP integration, which I have connected to Claude (but can be connected to any AI agent of your choice). I have asked it to import historical transactions by uploading PDF account statements, categorize/tag all transactions that took place while I was on vacation, and plan transfers across my accounts to cover expected payments.\n\nI hope some people that share my frustrations will find this app useful.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122776)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-stoke-money-personal-finance-app-built-around-a-cash-flow-forecast", "canonical_source": "https://stoke.money", "published_at": "2026-10-16 18:54:47+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-16 19:19:56.353933+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "agent-protocols", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Stoke Money", "Claude", "Anthropic", "Personal Capital", "Monarch", "Copilot", "Hacker News"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-stoke-money-personal-finance-app-built-around-a-cash-flow-forecast", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-stoke-money-personal-finance-app-built-around-a-cash-flow-forecast.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-stoke-money-personal-finance-app-built-around-a-cash-flow-forecast.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-stoke-money-personal-finance-app-built-around-a-cash-flow-forecast.jsonld"}}