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)
@clark_dinnison Hey - Please can you add support for UK banks. I'm aware Plaid supports UK banks so thought this would. Just signed up and realised I can't use Ray for the time being.
Looks like a great product
Really like the idea and just signed up for the paid plan. Unfortunately I'm failing to link my account, because I cannot find my bank (ING Germany) in the search. According to Plaid (https://plaid.com/docs/institutions/europe/) it's supported. Any ideas?
This is really cool. I’ve been playing around with AI agents for finances (mostly crypto), so seeing something broader like this is awesome.
A terminal CFO is such a niche-but-obvious idea the kind of tool you only build because you personally needed it. Curious about the storage layer: are you keeping financial data fully local, or is there a sync component? And how are you handling category inference for transactions LLM every time, or a cached classifier? Starring the repo.
does this work well if you have accounts across multiple banks? ive been trying to get a unified view of everything for months and most apps either dont support my bank or require connecting through some third-party aggregator which feels sketchy. the terminal-based approach is interesting though — at least i know where my data lives
yo this is cool i personally as well use claude code to manage all my money as json files and then there is a visual dashboard.. in html to serve all that data for me i a quick glance.. my one doubt is privacy even tho i currently use claude code so my data does goes to anthropic.. but soon i will switch to a local running gemma 4 (not sure if it will be capable ) i suppose this is open source privacy first and i can plug in a local model right ?
Hey I bought the api key and my bank is not supported by Plaid. Can I get a refund pls? (im in australia)
PS wish I could use this in AU
This looks really cool, but there is no way to disconnect your accounts, cancel, or amend your billing, and all of their support links are broken.
Hi @clark_dinnison this looks like a great product. I use Chase bank, which only supports OAuth via Plaid. The free version does not appear to support OAuth, does the paid version support it?
terminal-native finance tooling is underrated. most CFO tools assume you want a dashboard. the hard part isn't the CLI - it's the data model holding up when your financial situation gets messy.
Hello clark, I want to use your 'Ray' app , but I am super novice that I don't know even how to start your app.
I clicked your 'g-ray finance' but how to start with this Github?
If there is super simple guideline for the beginners like me who does not know even what the code is, then it will be more better for super novice beginners like me!
It sounds amazing to read the transactions, remember the goals, and run in my computer.
Thanks Nice work Clark!
Much needed! Since most tools fail at behavior change like you mentioned, so what specifically makes ray actually change user actions rather than just inform them???
Terminal based CFO is a cool concept! Curious -- how does it handle planning when your spending patterns are irregular? Like freelancer income that's different every month.
I’m not quite there yet when it comes to trusting AI with finance stuff, but this is a step in the right direction. I’m a huge fan of TUI apps, so this definitely ticks all the right boxes.
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.
Ray was featured in Open Source (68.3k followers), Developer Tools (511k followers), GitHub (41.2k followers) and Personal Finance (2.7k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 98.7k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
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.
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Clark Dinnison