Cloudflare

Building and Hardening My Spend Tracker

I built a personal spend tracker to answer one question quickly: where is my money actually going each month? The app ingests ASB statements, categorises transactions, tracks budgets, and runs a local AI assistant for summaries and cutback advice.

Over time it stopped being just a finance tool and became a proper systems project. Once I decided to put it on the public internet, the focus shifted from “does it work?” to “can I trust it when I am not watching it?”

How I Self-Hosted This Blog on a Mini PC

I got tired of the free tier anxiety. Vercel and Netlify are solid until they change their pricing or disappear, and I did not want a recurring bill for a static site. I wanted a machine sitting in my house actually serving the files.

The machine

The site runs on a generic mini PC — an N100 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. Mini PCs like this are worth knowing about if you are doing homelab work on a budget. They pull around 6W at idle, run silently, and handle a static site without any trouble. Overkill for this use case, but that just means it will never struggle.