Pixance
A personal Telegram bot that logs cashflow via natural language and stores it in Google Sheets.
Pixance is an expense tracker. And an income tracker. And a transfer tracker between pockets. That’s it.
I built it because I have never tracked my expenses before, so I have no idea where my money goes. A bad habit, I agree, and I want to change that. Tracking where your money comes from and where it goes requires discipline — something I’m still trying to work on.
I tried a couple of apps out there, but none kept me committed enough. Commitment comes from us, not the tools, but my excuse is that those apps make me focus more on which emoji fits the category and which category an expense should belong to (or just dumping them into untracked / other). I wanted a simpler tool where I can just say “buy lunch 35k” or “subscribe youtube 120k with cc” and have the app record and organize it on my behalf.
It’s built with Bun, TypeScript, and the Google Sheets API, with Vercel’s AI Gateway handling the natural language parsing. The bot is meant to be LLM-agnostic, but in practice I’m using google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite, so that’s what it’s tested against. It handles English and Bahasa Indonesia, with Rp as the default currency. I picked the AI Gateway because the free $5/month covers my usage comfortably and the integration is seamless.
Deployment runs on a Tencent Cloud VPS with Docker, shipped via a GitHub Actions pipeline that deploys on push — a good excuse to actually learn the CI/CD side of things.
Has it worked? Genuinely, yes. I track diligently now — every coffee, every transfer, every “just this once” — and the Sheet has finally given me a picture of where my money actually goes. I can see which categories I overspend on and which ones have room to breathe. Turns out the tool didn’t need to be clever; it just needed to get out of my way.