CLcloverich·Oct 6, 2025
Oh fun. Since this pokes at LLM I'll share my use case from last week. I built a similar(ish) tool locally (for personal use) as a CLI with an LLM. I download transactions from my bank and credit card, have it load them into a sqlite database, do some transformations (categorizing, grouping, excluding), and bottle up each command as a cli sub-command or flag. I used go, cobra, and the charm libs (to help with interactive labeling). I spent about a day on it to get it roughly usable, so I can drop in my updated transactions next month and get a basic report. Since the output is sqlite database and cli commands, I can also use claude code to ask it stuff, which was interesting because my original plan was to do all the asking myself and just have claude build the cli tool.
It works decently. I got out what i needed and fought very very hard
Read the rest
to not go more all in / code dive, etc. I just needed my monthly expense totals, ordered, with some clean-up. The code is so-so, but it mostly got things working in a few shots. Claude being able to iteratively run commands / issue queries while it worked was key to it getting functional, I think. I love that it runs local and spits out plain text for tables and such; to share with my wife i copy pasted some of the output to a text document then added some comments (markdown).
If I hacked on it more, I'd probably re-work the architecture a bit; I think coming up with a good design about how to ingest idempotently, and then how you want to transform transactions (i.e. in place, vs setting up rules / overrides and then generating a computed transactions table) is most important. After each mini feature having the LLM document its usage in the README, and of course committing, was key. It made it very easy to ditch conversations and start new ones, and point to the README / examples (as opposed to compacting prior conversation).
I think your tool at $5 is a great value; I had TONS of fun making the CLI app but it still took me a few hours of focused work in the end spread over a day, and relied on me having very basic prior experience to help steer it. I bet you can charge more while still keeping the product focused / maintenance low, and absolutely think there's a strong need for it -> While I am super tempted to get crazy with my local app and / automating calculations (etc) ultimately just seeing the money in / out, a few categories that I can sum up (groceries, eating out), and the top 15 expenses, that's really all we need to get our budget in place. Kudos on building a real product, esp. on figuring out how to keep it focused, finding the niche, and recognizing the opportunity to capitalize!
EDIT: My actual deps list here.
require (
github.com/BurntSushi/toml v1.5.0
github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles v0.21.0
github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea v1.3.5
github.com/charmbracelet/huh v0.7.0
github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss v1.1.0
github.com/charmbracelet/log v0.4.2
github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 v1.14.22
github.com/spf13/cobra v1.10.1
)