Building AlloCat.

I started thinking about personal finance before I even got my first job. I had this idea fixed in my head: if I wanted financial independence at some point in life, I would have to start planning for it from day one. So I started reading and learning about money management well before I had any real money to manage.

Just a Keep note

When I finally started earning, my system for handling it all was just a Google Keep note. One note. I would open it every month, write down what each category should get, what I owed, what I had, what I was saving toward, and plan from there. Nothing fancy at all.

But it worked. I built small savings, started investing, kept my day to day spending in check. The tool was not doing anything special. The act of planning before spending was what actually changed things.

The idea of turning this into a proper product had been sitting in my head for a long time. I picked it up and dropped it more than once. Life got in the way, other things took priority, and the Keep note kept doing its job, so there was never any real rush.

Web over native

When I finally came back to it seriously, my first plan was to build a mobile app. I had been meaning to pick up React Native anyway, so this felt like a good excuse. But I sat with it for a bit and thought, wait, I am already comfortable with the web. Why am I making this harder than it needs to be.

A PWA done well can feel almost exactly like a native app. Fast loading, smooth navigation, installable on the home screen. If I built it carefully, a user would not really be able to tell the difference between this and an app from the store. So I went that direction instead.

The cat in the name

The name took a while to figure out. It was TrackWise first. Then Budget to Freedom. Neither felt right. I kept coming back to the word allocation, because that was the actual idea the whole product was built around. I shortened it, played with it, and somewhere along the way landed on AlloCat.

At first it was just a clean short form of “allocation.” But once I noticed the “cat” sitting right there in the middle of the word, I could not unsee it. I started looking at it a bit more seriously and realized cats actually fit a finance app pretty well, not in the cute mascot way, but in their characteristics.

Cats always land on their feet. That is more or less what good financial planning gives you too, the ability to take a hit and still land upright. They are independent, they do not rely on anyone, which lines up with the whole point of financial independence. And they are picky. They do not just accept whatever you put in front of them. That is pretty close to what smart spending looks like as well. You do not just accept every expense, you decide.

Monochrome on purpose

So the cat stayed. But I did not want the app itself to feel cute.

A lot of budgeting apps go heavy on bright colors, gradients, mascots, gamified streaks. I went the other way. AlloCat is monochrome, minimal, and a little serious. Money is a serious thing for most people, and the app should feel like a tool, not a toy.

Planner, not tracker

The thing I want to make clear is what AlloCat actually is, because the space is crowded and most apps in it do something different.

AlloCat is not an expense tracker. It is a finance planner.

Most budgeting apps record the past. AlloCat is about deciding the future.

• Others: expense tracking — “Where did my money go?”
• AlloCat: money planning — “Where should my money go?”

The whole product runs on one idea, intentional allocation. Every rupee gets a purpose before you spend it, not a label after the fact. It is the same thing I was doing in my Keep note. The only difference is that now there is a proper interface around it.

Where you stand

The Keep note was never only about category allocations. I used the same note to track what I owed, what I had, and what I was saving toward. AlloCat keeps that idea.

You can see your net worth, your active debts, and the financial goals you have set for yourself. So at any point, you can open the app and get a clear sense of where you actually stand. Not just where this month’s money is going, but the bigger picture of your finances.

Ask the app

I also added a small AI assistant into the app. You can ask it finance related questions, and it answers based on your own data. Things like how much is left in a category, whether you can afford something this month, or how a goal is progressing. Anything you would have to figure out manually, you can just ask.

Right now it is running on a free model through OpenRouter. That is enough for where the app is at. I will probably move to a better one down the line, but the free tier is doing the job for now.

Built in the open

I also decided to keep AlloCat open source. The people who care about this kind of thing usually have strong opinions about how it should work, and I would rather have those people contributing than just using it. If you want to fork it, suggest changes, send a PR, or take the ideas and build your own version, that is all fair.

Try it at allocat.octane.team, or read the source at github.com/builtbyoctane/allocat.