Launched this week
Ray
Your personal CFO in the terminal
445 followers
Your personal CFO in the terminal
445 followers
Most personal finance apps show you charts. Ray tells you what to do and actually helps you plan. A terminal-based CFO that reads your real transactions, remembers your goals, and runs on your computer — not someone else's server. Open source. Free with your own keys.
A terminal CFO is such a niche-but-obvious idea the kind of tool you only build because you personally needed it. Curious about the storage layer: are you keeping financial data fully local, or is there a sync component? And how are you handling category inference for transactions LLM every time, or a cached classifier? Starring the repo.
Ray
@linoy_bar_gal Appreciate it! You're right — built it because I was tired of juggling spreadsheets and trying alternatives that wanted all my data on their servers.
Storage:
Fully local. Everything lives in an encrypted SQLite database on your machine (~/.ray/data/finance.db). Plaid access tokens are AES-256 encrypted at rest too. Nothing leaves your machine except the Plaid sync calls and what you send to the LLM in conversation. No sync component, no cloud database.
Categories:
Plaid provides personal_finance_category on each transaction during sync, so we get primary + detailed categories for free without any LLM call. From there the LLM can recategorize individual transactions in conversation if something's wrong, and you can create pattern-based auto-recategorization rules (e.g. "anything matching 'Whole Foods' → FOOD_AND_DRINK") that apply on future syncs. So it's Plaid's classifier as the baseline, human correction via the LLM as the refinement layer — no LLM inference on every transaction.
hope that helps!
terminal-native finance tooling is underrated. most CFO tools assume you want a dashboard. the hard part isn't the CLI - it's the data model holding up when your financial situation gets messy.
Ray
@mykola_kondratiuk 100% agree. The context layer is the magic. Ray maintains a memory across sessions that tracks your income, goals, strategy, and key life changes, so it can actually hold your full situation in its head. That's what lets it say something useful when you have 8 accounts across 3 institutions, a mortgage, variable income, and goals that conflict with each other.
It gets the nuance instead of starting from zero every time.
That session persistence is the part most finance tools skip. Every time you open them it's day zero - re-explain your salary, goals, context. Hard to give good advice without the arc.
Ray
@mykola_kondratiuk exactly. everyone's situation carries a lot of nuance and it must be captured otherwise the advice is bad. Ray always has perfect context of your accounts and what you care about.
Advice quality is a context problem more than a model problem. Solved upstream, the rest gets easier.
@clark_dinnison
Hey - Please can you add support for UK banks.
I'm aware Plaid supports UK banks so thought this would.
Just signed up and realised I can't use Ray for the time being.
Looks like a great product
Ray
@douglas_rose1 added support for UK banks. please `ray update` to get the latest version and try `ray link` again.
Socialist
Ray
@paulgeller just pushed up a fix for the `ray billing` command! you can run `ray update` to get the latest
I've also made it easier to remove linked accounts with the `ray remove` (it only worked for manual accounts previously).
Appreciate the feedback, thanks for checking it out!
Ray
@paulgeller email clark@rayfinance.app if you have any questions! I couldn't find broken support links but added my email directly to the readme
Hey I bought the api key and my bank is not supported by Plaid. Can I get a refund pls? (im in australia)
PS wish I could use this in AU
Ray
@gautham_srinivas_ of course - curious which bank it is? I'll issue refund now.
@clark_dinnison commonwealth bank of australia
Ray
@vibedonkey Totally fair. Here's what Ray does on the security side in case it helps:
All your financial data lives in a local SQLite db on your machine, encrypted at rest with AES-256 (SQLCipher) - Plaid access tokens are encrypted separately with AES-256-GCM
Config file is stored with 0600 permissions (only your user can read it)
Before anything goes to the AI, PII gets stripped — names and identifying details are scrubbed out. The model sees amounts and categories, not you.
Two outbound calls total: Plaid (bank sync) and Anthropic (chat). No server, no telemetry, no analytics, no account system
The whole thing is MIT and open source so you can read exactly what it does
The AI never sees who you are, and your data never lives anywhere except ~/.ray on your machine. If you delete that folder, it's gone.
Really like the idea and just signed up for the paid plan. Unfortunately I'm failing to link my account, because I cannot find my bank (ING Germany) in the search. According to Plaid (https://plaid.com/docs/institutions/europe/) it's supported. Any ideas?