Most personal finance apps show you charts. Ray tells you what to do and actually helps you plan. A terminal-based CFO that reads your real transactions, remembers your goals, and runs on your computer — not someone else's server. Open source. Free with your own keys.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 Clark here, maker of Ray.
Quick story on why this exists: I tried Monarch, Copilot, YNAB, Tiller, and Mint before it died. Every one of them had the same problem — I'd open it, stare at a dashboard for 30 seconds, close it, and nothing about my behavior would change. The app knew everything. I still had to do all the thinking.
So I built the opposite. You run `ray` in your terminal and it immediately shows your net worth, spending pace, budget alerts, and upcoming bills — no dashboard to navigate. Then you can chat with it and it actually tells you what to do, referencing your real goals and your real transactions. It's the first finance tool I've used that feels like a CFO instead of a spreadsheet.
A few things I made deliberate choices on:
🔒 Your data never leaves your machine. Everything lives in an AES-256 encrypted SQLite db at ~/.ray. PII (names, account numbers) is stripped before anything touches the AI. Two outbound calls total — Plaid for bank sync, Anthropic for the chat.
💰 Free forever if you bring your own Anthropic + Plaid keys. $10/mo managed mode if you don't want to mess with keys — data still stays local in that mode, I just proxy the API calls. No freemium feature-gating, no "unlock insights" nonsense.
🧠 It remembers. Mention you're saving for a house or switching jobs and every future session picks up where the last one left off. No re-explaining yourself.
🎯 It scores you. A daily 0–100 behavior score with streaks and unlockable achievements. I added this as an afterthought and it's the single thing that actually changed my spending. Kitchen Hero (no restaurants for a week), Monk Mode (5 zero-spend days), etc.
You can try the whole thing without linking a real bank — run `ray demo` and it seeds a fake portfolio you can poke at.
Install: npm i -g ray-finance
Repo: github.com/cdinnison/ray-finance (MIT)
About Ray on Product Hunt
“Your personal CFO in the terminal”
Ray launched on Product Hunt on April 12th, 2026 and earned 294 upvotes and 41 comments, earning #2 Product of the Day. Most personal finance apps show you charts. Ray tells you what to do and actually helps you plan. A terminal-based CFO that reads your real transactions, remembers your goals, and runs on your computer — not someone else's server. Open source. Free with your own keys.
On the analytics side, Ray competes within Open Source, Developer Tools, GitHub and Personal Finance — topics that collectively have 623.2k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Ray performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Ray?
Ray was hunted by Clark Dinnison. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Ray including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Clark Dinnison