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Personal Finance Apps: Development Practices and Mint Alternatives

The app released, there starts the most dramatic and stressful stage — idea validation. Beware that you haven’t confused MVP with “that can do” version. You observe how people perceive the product, what they do or don’t like, and what’s lacking. One of the most popular cross-platform frameworks is an open-source React Native framework, SQL Server Developer Job Description July 2023 created in JavaScript by Facebook. This solution enables startups to create software with truly native performance and user-experience flexibility. In many cases, it’s a much safer approach to create a financial app from scratch, relying only on well researched and established solutions like Plaid, Yodlee, and some others.

how to build a personal finance app

And it’s becoming increasingly important in a saturated market with a growing number of competitors. A simple user interface (UI) is key to achieving a satisfying UX. For instance, while a beautiful font might be great from a design standpoint, it’s useless in a finance app if it’s hard to read.

How long does it take to build personal finance applications?

The goal of an MVP is to learn as much as possible about customers with the least effort. Advanced users make more calculations than most of us can think of. Providing them with an in-app calculator will make their specific calculations easier.

What started as a simple expense tracker with categorization has evolved into an AI-enabled financial advisory platform that spans across web and mobile platforms. I believe Mint is a classic example https://forexarticles.net/7-ways-to-jump-start-your-cloud-computing-career/ of how to create a budget app and grow into a lucrative acquisition target. There are many ways AI is reforming the mobile app industry in terms of user engagement and developer app revenue.

Step 2: Developing and Testing Phase

So, for a visual example, we have listed three advanced AI-based features. They fit both for an individual robo-advisor and for a business solution. The need to manually transfer data from paper to a device is reminiscent of the days when you recorded your expenses in spreadsheets. And if you take into account how much time it took to search for the errors that inevitably happened, then these memories may not be so pleasant. A properly trained conversational engine makes a financial app easy to use and increases user engagement. We develop such modules with our deep in-house expertise in Machine Learning (ML), a subfield of AI.

  • As indicated by its name, this type of personal finance app is a straightforward app that requires users to input their data or financial information manually.
  • Startups typically opt for cross-platform mobile development frameworks to expedite time to market.
  • Such a product only has basic functionality, making it cheaper to implement.
  • Building a personal finance app is, thus, a good investment for a business.
  • As soon as MVP is approved, the developers can upgrade it with more customer-centric functions.

You can also make integrations with multiple payment systems to add more “colors” to your finance app. Or you can add gamification elements by allowing users to set spending or saving goals and badges once they achieve them. On average, developing a personal finance app like Mint or YNAB will take around 2,000-2,500 hours of constant work.

User Experience

Customers don’t have to be savvy financially to profit from using these apps – the best solutions are capable of making micro-investments and generating passive revenue. MobiDev can become your development team to create a technical project plan, both for its presentation to your investors and for further implementation. In Europe, your financial app has to comply with a whole series of regulations. Are you aware that, for example, an app related to any payment service in the European Union must use multi-factor authentication for user login? It is high time to mention the AI features we wrote about above. We figured out the technical side of creating an AI-powered financial app.

How do personal finance apps work?

Budgeting apps often will sync with your financial accounts to give you an overview in real-time when finances change. These apps may also organize spending history into categories to identify trends, making users aware of their habits over time, and helping them meet their budget goals.

For instance, most apps work in a client-server architecture, meaning the relevant data is constantly transmitted to and from the app. Without adequate safeguards, hackers can easily intercept the data stream and steal sensitive information. Aside from making integrations possible, APIs also help speed up development since you don’t need to create different integration functions from scratch.

Financial products come with a lot of requirements that seem quite complicated for people with little experience in the field. If we convinced you that building a budgeting application is worth a try, make sure your journey starts with focusing on users and their needs. And don’t forget about that as you develop, launch, and improve your product. Databases used in financial applications need to be reliable and secure. Some of the best database solutions are ArangoDB, MongoDB, Kibana, and Cassandra. Now that you’re motivated to invest in a personal finance application, let’s find out the details of a budgeting application development process.

how to build a personal finance app