Welcome to the first installment of the Lunch Money Community Spotlight!
As we continue to enhance our app, we wanted to start sharing stories about Lunch Money users who are building useful tools for themselves or the community.
In this newsletter, you’ll find updates on the developer ecosystem, including news surrounding the Lunch Money developer API and community-driven plug-ins and tools, to help you get the most out of Lunch Money.
This month, we are shining our spotlight on Tómas from LumoSync 🇩🇰
Tómas from Denmark talks to us about his new web app, LumoSync, which allows Lunch Money users to automatically import transactions from additional banks, credit cards and financial institutions across the EU. By using a service called GoCardless, LumoSync vastly increases the number of banks Lunch Money can sync with.
Q: Tómas, how did you come to start using Lunch Money?
I think I first saw it on Hacker News back in 2019 or 2020, but I sort of forgot about it because I was using another local app at the time. Then, in early 2021, I stumbled upon a post about Lunch Money on IndieHackers, an AMA I think. At that point, I was tired of the app I had been using and wanted something more powerful with a better UI, budgeting features, and useful visualizations — so I decided to give Lunch Money a try.
Q. You’re currently building a website called LumoSync that can help Lunch Money users automatically load transactions from European financial institutions. How does it work?
LumoSync aims to provide a super simple way to sync transactions to Lunch Money. Where Lunch Money uses Plaid to import transaction data, LumoSync uses a service called GoCardless, which is similar to Plaid but has better support for European financial institutions. For example, GoCardless supports 82 banks in Denmark, compared to eight for Plaid. While Plaid supports only 13 banks in Germany, GoCardless supports over 1000. You can find a list of banks that GoCardless supports here.
The good news is that all a potential LumoSync user needs to do to get started is to sign up for an account, paste in a Lunch Money access token, set up the connection(s) to their banks, and finally pair those bank accounts with the ones they have set up in Lunch Money. That’s it, really 😃
Q: What made you decide to start developing something?
When I started using Lunch Money, there was no support for syncing transactions from European banks. So first, I started with a script that I ran manually almost daily. That worked, but I got tired of having to remember to run something everyday, so I started working on something that would automatically import transactions.
I was also inspired by a service for YNAB that syncs European bank transactions for its users.
Q: How did you decide to share what you were building with the larger community?
I see people asking on Discord if this or that European country is supported. While some generous Lunch Money users have shared their scripts, I wanted to help less technical users (and technical ones tired of running something themselves) sync their bank accounts to Lunch Money.
Maybe it also allows me to kick off my own indie hacker thing… 🙂
Q: If Lunch Money users decide to use your service, how can they feel confident that you securely manage their data, such as API Keys and the information you can access with those API keys?
I only store the information needed to sync transactions (and eventually to group transfers between accounts). This information is encrypted at rest in the database. I have also configured a security-focused static analysis tool to scan the codebase.
Q. Is there anything you’d like to ask the Lunch Money user community for?
The app is still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s ready to take on a few beta users to test how it handles different banks, etc. Ideally, I’d like to find three or four Lunch Money users based in Europe who have accounts at multiple banks.
Once we get through the beta stage, my plan is to make it available to anyone who wants to use it for a monthly fee. I haven’t quite figured out the pricing yet, but I’m guessing it will be around €4-5 a month.
Click here to register for LumoSync Beta.
Developer API News
New endpoint: /recurring_items
We recently provided developers with early access to a new API endpoint, /recurring_items. This augments the existing /recurring_expenses endpoint to provide:
- New formula for capturing recurring patterns more accurately and flexibly
- Additional data on how transactions correlate to the each recurring item
As with all of our v1 APIs it is still in beta and subject to change. Feedback is welcome in the #💻-developer-api channel in our Discord community.
Updates on Lunch Money API v2
We’ve begun design work on a v2 version of the Lunch Money API! By popular request, this version of the API will use OpenAPI and follow a design-first approach. This means that we’ll be able to create documentation and a mock server to experiment with before implementing the full API.
Using this approach, we hope to quickly deliver on designs that have been thoroughly reviewed. If you’d like to be part of the team reviewing the v2 APIs reach out to JP on Discord or by simply replying to this email.
Do you have a Community Story?
We’d love to feature more members of our community in this newsletter. Are you a developer with a cool app, plug-in or tool that you want to share with the Lunch Money community? Please reach out to jp@lunchmoney.app!