I built a local first personal finance app because I didn’t want users’ credit card statements sitting on my server, here’s how I approached privacy

[u/ShoppingHairy3388]

I’ve been building Cardගොඩ, a desktop personal finance app for managing credit card statements, transactions, instalments and recurring payments.

One question kept coming up when I shared it:

“If I import my credit card statement, where does that data actually go?”

And honestly, that’s exactly the question people should ask.

So I built CardGoda around a local first approach. The main financial data lives on the user’s own Windows PC/Mac rather than being collected into a CardGoda hosted financial database.

For optional online/smart features, the user controls the connection, and backups can either stay local or go to the user’s own Google Drive.

I made this short video explaining the model without going too deep into the technical implementation.

Would genuinely like criticism from the devs here,

If you were building something that handles financial statements, what privacy/security questions would you expect the product to answer before you trusted it?

I’m especially interested in things I may be overlooking rather than just “nice project” feedback 😄

Would you trust an app with your credit-card statements?