Rocket Money charges you $8/mo to tell you that you spent too much on DoorDash.
If you already pay for Claude Code, your finance copilot is one git clone away.
FinanceBuddy wires your real bank accounts (via Teller.io) into Claude through MCP — locally. Ask in plain English:
"Can I afford a $2k flight in May?" "What subscriptions am I leaking on?" "How am I tracking vs last month?"
Claude answers with your actual numbers. No dashboards. No CSV exports. No "AI Insights" upsell screen.
- You already pay for Claude. The smartest LLM on the planet lives in your terminal. It should know how broke you are.
- Mint is dead. Rocket Money is mid. Both upsell you. Both ship your data somewhere downstream.
- Your bank data shouldn't live in someone else's S3 bucket. SQLite. On your laptop. That's the whole architecture.
- ~200 lines of glue beats a SaaS subscription. The repo is ~8 files. You can read it in a coffee.
Your transactions live in financebuddy.db — a SQLite file at the project root that you can rm any time. Nothing leaves your machine except calls to Teller (your bank's API, mTLS-pinned). The only LLM that ever sees the numbers is whichever model Claude Code is wired to in the session you're chatting in — so the floor of your trust is "how much do I trust Anthropic with the contents of an MCP tool response." That's a lower bar than "trust Rocket Money to never get breached, sold, or acquired by Intuit." You decide.
- 14 MCP tools —
get_balances,month_summary,spending_by_category,top_merchants,healthcheck,search,sync_now, and friends. - Auto-classifier that learns your salary cadence, finds subscription creep, and flags self-transfers so "dining" isn't inflated by your Schwab top-up.
- Sign normalization for the eternal credit-card vs checking-account sign war, so "spend" actually means spend.
- One-shot Teller Connect flow at
localhost:8787— link a bank in 30 seconds, token persists straight to SQLite.
You need:
- macOS or Linux with
python3 ≥ 3.10 - Claude Code installed (
claudeon PATH) - A free Teller.io account (dev tier is free and hits real banks)
Then:
git clone https://github.com/<you>/financebuddy.git
cd financebuddy
bash setup.shsetup.sh is idempotent. It creates .venv/, installs deps (httpx, fastmcp), checks your Teller mTLS certs, registers the financebuddy MCP server with Claude Code at user scope, and pops Teller Connect open so you can link your first bank. Re-run it whenever.
Open Claude Code anywhere on your machine. Just talk to it.
| You say | Claude calls |
|---|---|
| "what's my net worth" | get_balances |
| "how much on groceries last month" | month_summary, list_transactions |
| "sync my accounts" | sync_now |
| "anything weird in my spending" | healthcheck |
| "can I afford $2k for SF→Tokyo?" | get_balances + month_summary + reasoning |
Full tool list in CLAUDE.md.
Shell access if you want it:
./.venv/bin/python -m fb.sync # pull fresh data
./.venv/bin/python -m fb.connect_server # link another bankRaw bank data is gross. Credit cards have the opposite sign of checking. Transfers double-count as both income and spend. Merchant strings look like SQ *AC SF CA and AMZN MKTP US*M3K91. We unscrew it in three layers:
1. Sync writes Teller's payload almost verbatim.
fb/sync.py upserts each transaction as-is. Only category and merchant get lifted out of details; everything else stays in raw_json. No normalization happens here — the goal is to never lose Teller data.
2. Queries normalize at read time.
fb/classify.py defines a FLOW_EXPR SQL fragment that flips the sign on credit/loan accounts so positive always means inflow and negative means outflow, regardless of account type. Every newer query joins accounts and uses this expression. Per-row noise filters (excluded, is_transfer) hide manually-flagged junk and internal transfers from aggregates.
3. Merchant classification (auto_enrich).
A merchant taxonomy (income:salary, fixed:rent, variable:dining, …) is built up by combining four sources:
- Salary detection — recurring positive deposits on depository accounts with stable amounts and biweekly/monthly cadence, or unambiguous payroll keywords (
PAYROLL,DIRECT DEP). - Subscription detection — stable monthly outflows $1–$200 across ≥3 months, with investment contributions excluded so Robinhood doesn't get labeled as Netflix.
- Keyword scan — substring matches against curated lists of utilities, gyms, insurance providers, streaming services, grocers, gas stations, etc.
- LLM gap-fill —
get_unclassified_merchantsreturns the remaining merchants with meaningful spend (pre-filtered to drop card-payment and brokerage noise), Claude classifies them from world knowledge, and the labels persist viaclassify_merchant.
User-confirmed labels (source='user') are never overwritten by automation. The healthcheck tool reads the resulting taxonomy to produce a structured Income / Fixed / Variable / Savings rollup — which is what makes "anything weird in my spending" a question Claude can actually answer.
fb/ ~8 file Python package — the whole app
db.py SQLite schema + connection helpers
teller.py Teller API client (mTLS)
sync.py CLI: Teller → SQLite upsert
link_bank.py CLI: save one enrollment
connect.html Teller Connect browser page
connect_server.py Localhost server (port 8787) for Teller Connect
classify.py Merchant taxonomy + auto-classify heuristics
mcp_server.py fastmcp stdio server — what Claude talks to
financebuddy.db Your data. Gitignored. Don't commit it.
certificate.pem Teller mTLS cert. Gitignored.
private_key.pem Teller mTLS key. Gitignored.
.env TELLER_APP_ID, TELLER_ENV. Gitignored.
setup.sh One-shot installer (above).
requirements.txt httpx, fastmcp.
CLAUDE.md Project notes for Claude Code (read this).
archive/ Old SaaS-era code (FastAPI + Next.js). Dormant.
Kept for history; nothing in the live app references it.
- Everything is local. No telemetry, no third-party servers besides Teller.
financebuddy.dbis plain SQLite. Access tokens are stored unencrypted — fine for a single-user laptop, but never commit the DB or the certs (the included.gitignoreblocks*.pem,*.db, and.env).- The MCP server is registered at user scope — only your account on this machine can talk to it. No network listener.
- Claude has opinions about your money. They are not financial advice and the author isn't liable for what you do with them. Sanity-check before you YOLO.
claude mcp list doesn't show financebuddy.
Re-run bash setup.sh. If claude isn't on your PATH, install Claude Code first.
Teller certs missing error on sync.
Drop your certs at ./certificate.pem and ./private_key.pem, or set TELLER_CERT_PATH / TELLER_KEY_PATH env vars to wherever you keep them.
429 Too Many Requests from Teller.
You're rate-limited. Wait a minute and re-run fb.sync.
Want a fresh start?
rm financebuddy.db && bash setup.sh wipes local data and re-links.