Happy Thanksgiving weekend to those who celebrate, and Happy Friday to those who don’t!
We’re back with another edition of our community newsletter. This month, we’re featuring Cristian, a Lunch Money user who has come up with a unique and efficient way to review daily transactions. We’re also letting you know about an upcoming in-person meetup!
Our November Community Spotlight is on Cristian, from California by way of Colombia!
Have you ever wished you could quickly categorize your transactions as they came in and only log into your Lunch Money account once or twice a month to manage your overall budgets and trends? Good news for Telegram users: You can now do it!
Q: How did you come to start using Lunch Money?
I used Mint for years until they merged with Credit Karma and ruined the product. After searching for alternatives, I ended up with Lunch Money. I like using a paid-for product that isn’t trying to harvest my data or trying to sell me other financial services. I also like that there is an API. Who can resist an API?
Q: What made you create a Telegram bot for Lunch Money?
I like that Lunch Money is mainly web-based, and my wife and I have a ritual at the end of every month where we look at everything we spend and try to understand whether we are being reasonable or not. We realized, however, that it’s just too much to do in a single sitting. It became clear that it would be better to review our transactions as quickly as possible after they occur, but opening the website every day felt like overkill.
I am an avid and happy user of Telegram and love its API, so using it to streamline the whole process made sense. Lonchera is a bot that polls Lunch Money and notifies me via Telegram when I have new transactions. This makes it much easier to categorize and annotate the transactions because I receive them shortly after they occur, and I don’t need to log in to the website. Here is an example of how I use it:
I also use the bot to add transactions manually and check my spending against my budgets. Now, at the end of the month, my wife and I can focus on analyzing our spending habits instead of trying to categorize transactions.
Q: I’m curious: How did you come up with the name for your bot?
The name Lonchera comes from the Spanish word for lunchbox. Fun fact: I actually built a bot similar to Lonchera for Slack over seven years ago. It used Plaid directly, but with Lunch Money, I get all the great budgeting and analytics as well.
Q: You have provided a way for Telegram users to start a conversation with your bot. If they choose to do so, how can they be confident that you are protecting their access token and transaction information?
This bot used to run on a Raspberry Pi in my closet, but I now run it on fly.io. That gives an extra layer of security and reliability compared to what I had before. The disks that store the token and transaction information are encrypted.
That said, I can access the server and see any tokens stored on the platform, so users must trust me to some degree. While I did have some ideas about encrypting the API keys themselves so that not even I can see them, I realized this would become cumbersome for the users.
Q: Can security-minded users host a version of Lonchera themselves? And if they do so, what do they need to set up on Telegram?
Yes! The bot is open source on GitHub. Users can learn more about how the bot works here. I’ve also added this guide on how to run your own instance.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to ask the LM user community for? (Beta users, code contribution, etc.)
It would be great to get some other community members using this bot. I’ve built it primarily for myself, so feedback on improving it (or even contributions) would be appreciated. You can reach me on the Lonchera channel on Discord.
Thank you for sharing Lonchera with us, Cristian, and for the instructions on self-hosting. It seems like an excellent way for Telegram users to monitor their Lunch Money transactions.
Lunch Money v2 API Update
Over the past few months, we have been working on a new version of the Lunch Money API, with updated documentation and tools, plus some of the most requested features. If you want to provide feedback on the API design before it is finalized, please reach out to [email protected]!
Upcoming: Lunch Money x Vancouver meetup!
We are hosting our second-ever in-person meetup in Vancouver on Tuesday, December 10! If you’re in the area, please join us for some mingling, a demo by Jen on the brand new budgeting feature, and some fun giveaways!
Not in Vancouver but interested in a meetup in your city? Let us know where you are based and we’ll see if we can make it happen in the future!
Follow us on social media!
We’d love to connect with you on social media. Find us on the following platforms:
Do you have a Community Story?
We’d love to feature more members of our community in this newsletter. Have you developed an app, plug-in or tool that you want to share? Please reach out to jp@lunchmoney.app!
Even if you aren’t a developer, if you have ideas on how we can make it easier for users to take advantage of contributions from the developer community, I’d love to hear from you.
