u/KingAroan

Hey everyone. Today's post will be smaller but still very impactful. This week I have been working to better manual transactions by adding the ability to add receipts to transactions and even better, forward/auto-forward them and have them analyzed. Using AI to pull line items, suggested categories (per item). This can either be done on the mobile application taking a photo of the receipt or by forwarding it to an email address. We have two types of email to make life simple, a single email address that anyone can send to and it checks your account and attaches it to your account, or a randomized inbox that is specific to you (anyone with knowledge can send to this address). What this enables us to do is allow you to either add trusted emails to your account, and any email you send to the system will be associated with your account. Or if you want to add auto-forward rules to something like Amazon, where it will come to us from Amazon, then you can have it forward to the private inbox.

Keeping in theme with security, the inbox does not store data; it is used to pull the information and store it in our secure storage encrypted to your client key. Remember our platform encrypts all your data with a customer key that is unique to you.

This is the first bit of AI that we have added, as we want to be cautious around what we handle and make sure that it is only handled in the way you want it. This is the reason most for our platform will be a scoped MCP that you can hook your preferred AI to, allowing it to or restricting access to certain data types. However, the AI feature is opt-in, so you need to enable it. Otherwise, you can still upload receipts and create your line items manually if you wish.

Now for the bad side, this feature isn't released just yet. It will be released this week after I iron out a few more prompt flows to make sure it is good to go. If you would like to start checking it out and letting me know how it works for you, sign up for the waitlist at https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/ and I will be in touch. Remember we also have the new feedback portal at https://feedback.403fin.io where you can upvote and discuss what features you would like to see.

Lastly, I feel the application is ready for release, but I promised in my first post(s) that I would not release it publicly until I had a third-party penetration test. That way, my claims about security are put to the test. This isn't just throwing AI at it and saying I am good; this is a third-party professional that will come in when they have time over the next couple of weeks, and put it through its paces. Once it is good, meaning if anything is found, it is fixed and retested, then I will remove the access code and be able to release. Sadly, this just means I am out the added time, but I believe in security and wouldn't want to publish until then. I have yet to see any other application hold a launch until their security is tested.

A week ago I asked this sub for people to break a budgeting app I've been building, and a few of you did. This is the follow-up, because "I'm listening to feedback" is easy to say and boring to read; so here's what you actually caught and what changed.

What you found The search screen was lying. If you typed while it was still fetching, it would tell you "no results" instead of "still looking"; which is the worst possible answer, because it makes you think your data is missing. Search is now server-side, it says when it's still working, and it filters by account.

One of you had a merchant showing up under two spellings, so it looked like two different subscriptions. You can now rename a merchant once and have it apply everywhere; transactions and recurring, even the logo lookup follows the rename.

And an embarrassing one: overspent envelopes were rendering in the same green as healthy ones. A budget that congratulates you for blowing it is worse than no budget. Fixed.

Why I don't think this is another budgeting app Most budgeting apps tell you what you spent. I'm more interested in what that means.

• Net worth trajectory projects forward from your recurring income and bills, plus a residual for discretionary spending. This one is still a work in progress and still buggy.
• Cash flow forecast at 30, 60 and 90 days. Once we lock in better formulas, I look to increase the flow forecasting.
• Cost of debt shows interest paid year-to-date and interest accruing this month, and states "covers 3 of 5 debts" when it only has rates for three. It would be easy to quietly under-report and look better. It doesn't.
• Debt payoff does avalanche, snowball, or an order you set yourself, with a payoff date per debt and how much interest you save versus paying minimums. This isn't financial advice, it's provem methods that help you see which route you want to take.
• Recurring detection distinguishes a subscription you cancelled from one you dismissed, flags recurring charges that stopped showing up (which catches both failed payments and subscriptions you thought you'd killed), and spots when one provider is billing you twice under different descriptors.
• Reimbursements are treated as budget-neutral, not as income, so paying for a group dinner doesn't make you look like you got a raise.
• Better Accessibility Options The web app should be fully able to be navigated with just a keyboard, added voice over support to tapping fields will read it when enabled, added additional color panel supports for higher contrast differences. If you see or have any issues, please let me know as we want to cater to anyone. If something isn't working correctly or it needs to be modified, please let me know.

Eight budgeting methods are still there and you can switch between them without losing data, that part hasn't changed since last week.

Platforms — the part that actually moved Android: there's a real APK you can download and install today. It's a sideload, and I'll be straight about why: Play distribution is waiting on organisation verification, so rather than sit on it I publish signed builds directly with the SHA-256 on the download page so you can verify what you're installing. Today's build went up this afternoon.

iOS: TestFlight in the next week or two. Both platforms got home-screen widgets — budget status, net worth, upcoming bills, and account balances, four on each OS. They draw actual charts: a net-worth trend line, budget bars with a pace marker showing whether you're spending ahead of the period, a week strip for bills, and a distribution bar for where your cash sits. On iOS 18 there's also an Add Transaction button you can put in Control Center, and on Android an equivalent Quick Settings tile, so logging a coffee doesn't mean opening the app. Manual entries are still a work in progress as most people are syncing accounts.

The widget privacy design is the bit I'm most pleased with. Widgets are off by default, and they're not gated behind a paid tier — I didn't want to charge you for the privilege of seeing your own money on your own home screen. Amounts sit behind a second, separate toggle. And when that toggle is off, the amounts aren't masked at render — they are not written to disk at all. The charts render from normalised progress values, never absolute figures, so a widget can show you're 70% through your grocery budget without your phone storing what that is in currency. Lock-screen widgets treat merchant and account names as sensitive too, because "Super Sensitive Charge" is a disclosure even without a number attached.

Bring your own AI Landing later this week: you'll be able to connect your own AI assistant to your finances, with the app acting as the gate rather than the pipe. Per-connection, you choose which fields it can see — you can hide merchant names, or descriptions, or amounts — and you can make entire accounts structurally invisible to it, not filtered but genuinely absent. It's read-only unless you explicitly enable writes, and even then it's limited to a handful of non-destructive operations. It cannot move money. That's not a setting; there's no code path for it. Our application can never move money! This sure beats giving an AI full access to your accounts.

Security, stated honestly Since a few people asked last week, and since I'd rather be checkable than impressive:

• Your financial data is sealed under an encryption key unique to your account, held in a separate key management system.
• Bank tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they're stored.
• Row-level security isolates every account at the database layer, so an application bug can't leak one user's data to another.
• Delete your account and after the 30-day recovery window your key is destroyed, which reaches backups in a way that deleting rows does not.
• We make money from subscriptions. No ads on any tier, no data sales.

Speaking of security: the external penetration test is being scheduled now, and we're aiming to open signups publicly in under a month. I said last week I'd rather launch late than launch leaky, and that still holds. If there are any findings, they will be fixed before public release.

What I'm asking for Same as last week, still true: people who'll use this the way a normal person uses a budgeting app, not the way a QA engineer does. Set up a budget, track a month, and tell me what's broken, what's confusing, and what's missing. This does not need someone technical, just anyone willing to provide honest feedback.

If you register interest and you're willing to actually test and report back, you get 30% off for 12 consecutive months. There's a free tier that stays free either way, and paid plans are $4.99–$14.99/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee on web purchases. While in app purchases are not live yet, there will be an Apple and Android tax, we don't have the margins to absorb their fees, so I highly recommend when we release publicly to check it out on the web first and use the apps, not subscribe from the apps.

Join the waitlist here: https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/

I'll be reaching out to people directly with a few questions — what you're using today, what made you stop using the last app you tried, and which platform you're on.

We also opened a feedback, bug report, roadmap and change log that is connected to the application's SSO, but open now to see what and where we are going. https://feedback.403fin.io.

Once again, all data in the images are from a seeded test account connected to sandbox data, so no live data used in it.

Links if you want to check my work

• Android download (with checksum): https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/download/
• Public roadmap and changelog: https://feedback.403fin.io/
• Status page: https://status.403fin.io/
• Pricing: https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/pricing/
• Security and privacy: https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/security/
• Help docs: https://help.403fin.io/
• Why it's called 403: https://403fin.io/blog/why-its-called-403-finance/
• Why I built it: https://403fin.io/blog/why-we-built-forbidden-finance/

Happy to get into the architecture in the comments if anyone wants to.

I've spent the past year building Forbidden Finance, a budgeting and net worth app, and I'm looking for a small group of people to beta test it and tell me what's broken, confusing, or missing before we open the doors to everyone.

All images listed above are from a test/demo account that while on production is connected to sandboxed bank connectors and fed with fake data.

Being upfront: signups are currently closed. They will stay closed until we've completed an external penetration test (hopefully a couple of weeks), because I'd rather launch late than launch leaky. If you join the waitlist, I'll be reaching out to a handful of testers directly with invites.

Security is the whole point Most finance apps treat your data as the product. This one doesn't, and the architecture reflects that:

• Every server runs with full disk encryption, and all connections use TLS 1.2 or higher.
• Your financial data is encrypted with keys unique to your household. Amounts, account details, and personal information are sealed under per-customer keys that live in a separate key management system, so even a stolen copy of our database would not reveal your financial data.
• On top of that, row-level security isolates every household at the database layer, so even an application bug can't leak one user's data to another.
• We make money from subscriptions, not surveillance. No ads on any tier, and we don't sell or share your data.

Eight budgeting methods, because no single one works for everyone Every app seems to pick one philosophy and force it on you. We built eight, and I'll be honest about the tradeoffs of each:

• 50/30/20 — income split into needs, wants, and savings. Simple enough to start today, but coarse; it won't tell you where the "wants" money actually went.
• Pay Yourself First — savings comes off the top, the rest is spendable. Makes saving automatic, but gives you little day-to-day spending detail.
• Zero-Based — every dollar gets a job until unassigned hits zero. Total control, highest effort. You have to actually keep up with it. What most other applications use as it is tried and true.
• Envelope — fixed amounts per category with rollover. Hard limits genuinely help stop overspending, but it's rigid when life doesn't cooperate.
• Kakeibo — the Japanese mindful-spending method, with a weekly discretionary allowance and a monthly reflection. Builds real awareness of habits; requires some journaling discipline. Most fun once we open access to the MCP to get a pull and summary of how you felt you did vs the actual numbers.
• FIRE — savings-rate driven, computes your financial independence number and time to reach it. Great if early retirement is the goal, but it assumes an aggressive savings rate.
• Values-Based — you weight discretionary spending across the things you actually care about. Your budget ends up matching your priorities; the setup is subjective and takes some thought.
• Custom — build your own groups with fixed, percentage, or remainder allocations. It can be anything, which also means you're the one designing it.

You can switch methods without losing your data, so trying a few to see what sticks is kind of the intended workflow.

What else is in there

• Recurring transactions: subscriptions, bills, and paychecks are detected automatically, you get upcoming-bill reminders, and the app flags recurring charges that look like they've stopped, which catches both failed payments and subscriptions you thought you canceled.
• Net worth: daily history over time, an allocation breakdown by asset class, and the ability to exclude accounts you don't want counted.
• Debt payoff: snowball, avalanche, or a custom order you define, with a projected payoff date for each debt and a calculation of interest saved compared to paying minimums only. Amortization schedules for mortgages and loans.
• Achievements: bronze, silver, and gold badges across eleven categories, from budgeting streaks to debt milestones. Some people are motivated by this stuff, some aren't; it's there if you are.
• Multi-currency: automatic bank connections currently cover North American institutions. Accounts anywhere else in the world work today through manual accounts in any currency, with exchange-rate conversion handled properly. International bank connections are on the roadmap, but I won't pretend they're automatic yet.

Platforms

The web app is live now. iOS and Android apps are launching shortly, and beta testers will be among the first invited to those as well.

What I'm looking for

A handful of people who will use this like a normal person uses a budgeting app, not like a QA engineer. Set up your budget, track your month, poke at the features, and tell me what's broken, what's confusing, and what's missing. You don't need to be technical; honestly, the less technical the better, because those are the issues we're least likely to find myself.

There's a free tier, and paid plans run $4.99 to $14.99 a month with a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first charge. Selected beta testers will also get a personal discount code for 30% off their first 12 months if you ever decide a paid plan is worth it. No pressure either way; what I mostly want is your feedback.

Join the waitlist here: https://403fin.io/forbidden-finance/ Please click the "Join the Waitlist" button at the top of the page.

If you want the backstory before committing:

• Why it's called 403 Finance: https://403fin.io/blog/why-its-called-403-finance/
• Why we built it: https://403fin.io/blog/why-we-built-forbidden-finance/

Happy to answer questions in the comments, including the deeper security architecture questions if anyone wants to get into it. This project has changed so much over the year and it is to a point I am ready to release, but am going to get an external penetration test, because your finances should have trust.