Hello! 👋 This is a monthly issue of the Lunch Money Community Newsletter.
We send this to share exciting news within our developer ecosystem and broader community so you can get the most out of Lunch Money!
Happy New Year to all our readers!
This month, we have an inspiring community newsletter and a major announcement to share!
Lunch Money has always been a web-first platform. While a mobile app has been at the top of everyone’s wishlist for the past six years, it wasn’t feasible for Jen — at the time, a company of one — to develop and maintain multiple platforms while still expanding the product.
As an early compromise, one of the first features Jen introduced was a public developer API (read: what the heck is that anyway?), which allowed the tech-savvy Lunch Money community to create their own tools and plug-ins, including mobile solutions.
Many users took on the challenge, with some projects making it onto the App or Play Store. Others have remained open source for developers to build and improve locally.
If you’ve been following along on Discord, you may have noticed Lunch Money Pal, a popular mobile companion app developed by Lunch Money user, Wilson. Wilson managed to get hundreds of Lunch Money users on his app without leaving TestFlight, the iOS testing platform. We also met him in person at our Toronto meetup last summer!
When the opportunity presented itself, we reached out to acquire his app as the official Lunch Money companion app and welcomed him onto the team as an engineer!
Let’s get to know Wilson’s story!
Our January Community Spotlight is on Wilson, the creator of Lunch Money Pal
Q: How did you come to start using Lunch Money?
Like many others, I used to use Mint years ago. When I moved to Japan in 2019, I stopped using Mint and switched to Moneytree, because Mint didn’t support the Japanese bank I was with. I moved back to Canada towards the end of 2023 and I was looking for a solution to start from scratch. I found Lunch Money on Reddit and really liked it because of my affinity for indie-made apps, and the rule-based transaction categorization reminded me of Mint. Ironically, I also wanted something that wasn’t mobile-first because I mainly managed my finances using my laptop.
Q: What gave you the idea of creating Lunch Money Pal?
I was encouraging my boyfriend to start doing more to organize his finances around the same time and suggested that he try out Lunch Money as well. But for those who are newer to personal finance, managing your transactions in a big spreadsheet format can seem overwhelming, and there’s functionality in Lunch Money that you might not need. The idea of just being able to swipe through transactions and access basic functions was appealing.
Selfishly, I also wanted a faster way to review a particular transaction or check my spending on the go.
Q: How did you manage to grow Lunch Money Pal to over 200 users while never leaving Testflight?
It was 100% due to the existing Lunch Money community. Being willing to share with and engage with the community consistently is critical – not everyone will see what you’ve built when you first share it, so you have to keep showing up! Responding to feedback and suggestions also helps build trust that the app will continue to be maintained and improved. Investing in a product is hard when many of them become neglected or abandoned.
Q: Lunch Money Pal has been a hit with both iPhone and Android users. At what point did you begin to wonder if this could become the official Lunch Money mobile app?
Frankly, I had never really imagined that Lunch Money Pal would become the official Lunch Money mobile app. At most, I thought I could work with Jen to figure out how to use the app to bring more customers to Lunch Money because I believed that having this additional interface was helpful for many customers, including myself.
At the same time, I was dealing with a lot of frustrating back and forth with the famously hard to work with Apple App Review team. I worried that I would never be able to get the app into public release [as an unofficial offering], let alone the full vision of all of the functionality that I wanted to build out. There’s only so much I could do as someone who had just built an app using the public developer API.
Q: Is there anything you can share about what users can look forward to in future releases of the Lunch Money app?
I see two big positives of joining the Lunch Money team: I can commit a lot more time to working on the mobile app now, and having access to the inner workings of Lunch Money ensures that the information you see on the web app is consistent with what you see in the mobile app.
I think the long-term vision is to achieve almost full feature parity with the web version. (There’s also a big redesign in the works, but I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to share about that!). Editor’s notes: 👀
Q: Will you be working on other aspects of the Lunch Money product?
I’ve already started working on some other parts of Lunch Money! One thing I’m pretty excited about is helping build out the V2 API from the other side. Lunch Money Pal takes advantage of the public developer API endpoints more than most apps. Having worked with Lunch Money as an outsider, I’ve developed some opinions on improving the existing V1 API.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your journey with the community?
I love the idea that “you can just build stuff,” whether building on top of Lunch Money’s developer APIs or anything else you’d like to see in the world!
I’ve come to appreciate that building things for an existing and friendly community makes the experience much more pleasant. (The App Store Review team makes things much less pleasant). The Lunch Money community has been fantastic in their support of Lunch Money Pal so far, and everyone I’ve interacted with really understands what it’s like to build things as an indie creator.
Thank you, Wilson! We look forward to seeing more of your contributions to Lunch Money!
As you can expect, we are continuously updating and improving the app to simplify your mobile experience. Feel free to join the discussion in the #📱-mobile-app channel in our Discord community, and download the app today — it’s available for iOS and Android worldwide!
Calling all Financial Coaches!
Are you a financial coach who loves using Lunch Money? We’re exploring a certification program that can help you to find more clients to guide you to financial success using Lunch Money. For more details, please visit the page below and join the waitlist to be the first in line when we launch!
Connect with us on social media!
Check out our latest YouTube video by financial coach Jacob Wade!
From budgeting hacks like automating savings and auditing expenses to practical advice like meal prepping, buying used, and DIY projects, these tips will empower you to take control of your finances and hit your goals faster.
Finally, 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.
