Snoopy — an app for working out where your money comes and goes — is available for Windows. It’s free to download and use, and you can test it out with built-in sample data. Most features are available at no cost. If you want everything, it’s a one-off purchase of NZD $18 to unlock all features on that device. No subscription! More information is here or you can download it directly here. A Mac version is on the way.

Last year, our household spent $38,728 on insurance: house, car, contents, life, income protection, trauma, TPD, and professional policies combined. That’s more than the $35,291 we spent at supermarkets. The fact that we’ve spent that much on insurance, and that we’ve spent more on insurance than at the supermarket for each of the last three years, surprised me.

Do you know where your money goes?

Not roughly. Not “mostly rent or mortgage and groceries, I think.” Actually know, know: with enough clarity that you could say with confidence where your money really goes.

Most people can’t. I couldn’t either, until recently.

What changed, for me, was building a tool that turns a pile of CSVs into a clear picture of spending in a single sitting. That’s what Snoopy does.

Believe me. I’ve tried. I’d download transaction data from my household’s various bank and credit card accounts and create my own spreadsheet in Excel. But it took so long, so I would only do it “periodically”. Which eventually came to mean — every couple of years or so.

I tried a bunch of tools. But they never felt like a good fit for me. I never felt like I could trust whether transfers from one account had been double-counted. I didn’t like the way transactions could be categorised. They had all sorts of bells and whistles which I’m sure are great for some people, but they were distractions from what I wanted to do, which was to simply get a clear picture of my actual spending. Sometimes they would enforce a budgeting philosophy or approach which didn’t align with how our household works.

And most of them stored my data on their own servers, and I had to use them while I was online. That made me uneasy.

I had an itch to scratch, and a desire to work on a meaty coding project. So I built something that’s better for me. And hopefully: for lots of other people as well.

Initial feedback has been very promising:

  • “I am loving Snoopy and am finding it very polished. You should be proud of it. The concept is something that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I can see it becoming a staple part of my financial audit process.”
  • “Loving the user experience so far! Easy to upload transactions and start categorising.”
  • “was going to look at [another service] again soon but this feels the perfect level.”
  • “Importing CSVs was a dream.”
  • “Sheee-!#. You’ve done heaps since [the last version]. The welcome/setup screen and sandbox modes are a great idea as are the category/subs suggestions. Amaaaaazing.”
  • “have been looking for something like that for years and years — have tried [a variety of other services] but none really worked for what I wanted — Snoopy sounds like the answer I’ve been looking for. The business model behind it sounds sensible, honest, private and practical too, which makes it an easy decision to support — great work.”

Multiple people have also said they’ve identified subscriptions that they no longer needed, and immediately ended up saving money from trying out Snoopy.

How I ended up building Snoopy

When people ask me what I do, I often joke that I’m a “professional dilettante”.

I’ve done lots of things. I’ve worked in banks, as a financial services lawyer, in a hedge fund, in a statutory trustee company, as a lawyer focusing on trusts and estate planning, and in my own financial planning business. I’ve also been an external company director and a stay-at-home-dad. Now I’m getting into software development.

It’s not the most conventional career path, but it has kept life interesting. For the right people in the right circumstances, I’d argue that this type of unusual path can be an advantage, rather than representing a lack of focus. It has given me a pretty unusual combination of perspectives. For instance: law taught me to think about risk, edge cases, and the importance of the small stuff (and the consequences of not doing so). Financial planning taught me how real people actually think about their money — and their lives, in enormous depth.

Of everything I’ve done, Snoopy has been the biggest single project I’ve ever worked on. Bigger than any individual report or project I worked on professionally, bigger than my Masters project, bigger even than helping my wife with her doctoral research.

It has been a labour of love. Genuinely. But the distance between creating “a tool that works for me” and “a product that works for other people” is enormous. If it was just for me, it would have been a lot easier. The polish, the edge cases, the packaging, the encryption, the store submissions: that’s where most of the time (and frustration) went.

(I wrote an article a while back hypothesising that AI would speed up the first 90% of a project but the last mile would remain hard. Building Snoopy reinforced this hypothesis for me.)

Snoopy isn’t the only software I’ve built — I’ve worked on a range of other projects, including Flawcastr, Shuffle, and others. But for now, it’s the big one, and it’s the one I want to tell you about today.

What Snoopy actually looks and feels like

I’m not going to give you a feature list. The Snoopy website already does that.

The short version: download your transactions from your bank as a CSV file (which, to my knowledge, is something every New Zealand bank lets you do). Drop it into Snoopy. Answer a few questions as the app walks you through the import. Repeat for each of your accounts, which Snoopy collates into a single database.

Before you know it, you’re looking at a picture of how you’re actually spending. Categories emerge. Patterns become visible. Things you suspected but couldn’t prove are suddenly right there in front of you.

And the thing that always tripped me up in spreadsheets and with other services — transfers between my own accounts being double-counted? Snoopy handles this simply and transparently.

Categorisation works similarly. Snoopy suggests category names based on the patterns in your own transactions, rather than imposing a taxonomy on your life. When you categorise one transaction, it offers to apply the same decision to similar ones past and future, so the work compounds.

That’s it. It shows you what’s coming in, what’s going out, and where it’s all going.

It is deliberately, stubbornly, focused on that one thing. Snoopy just answers the question of how your money moves. I think there’s real value in software that does one thing well and doesn’t try to be everything to everyone.

The philosophy behind Snoopy

My wife and I recently renovated our kitchen. (Or more precisely, paid for people to renovate the kitchen!)

One of the things that struck me with this renovation project was how many decisions there are with a project like this. Decisions behind decisions behind decisions. We had a great experience with our team, and they consulted with us effectively. But it struck me that it was unreasonable for them to consult us on every little thing. It also struck me how lucky we were that we found a team who were philosophically aligned with what we wanted, or at least, were able to calibrate to what our priorities were.

It’s analogous with software. There are. so. many. decisions. that have to be made behind the scenes. Many of them are technical, from the big (what tech stack to use?) to the small (what do I call this variable, where do I make this feature visible, and how do I describe it to the user?).

Some are philosophical. And I believe this is what makes Snoopy unique.

For one thing: Snoopy is focused on one thing. Helping you see where your money actually goes. I’m not trying to do other things, like work out your net worth, or forecast your financial future (Flawcastr can do that).

Another is that Snoopy is obsessively focused on privacy. Your data never leaves your computer. This isn’t a feature I added after the fact. It’s how the app was designed from day one. It’s part of its DNA. All processing happens locally. There are no cloud servers, no data transmission, no tracking. I can’t see your data, sell it, or lose it in a data breach.

(The flipside: if you forget your password, I can’t help you either. Sorry about that.)

Finally, Snoopy is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. I don’t begrudge subscriptions when they make sense: I happily pay for services that require ongoing infrastructure and maintenance. But a tool that runs entirely on your computer, processes your data locally, and doesn’t need a server? That shouldn’t cost you $10 or more per month forever.

(Another way of putting it: one of Snoopy’s features is helping you understand your recurring costs. I didn’t think the answer to your subscriptions should be another subscription.)

If you’ve followed my writing over the years, you might recognise the instinct. I ran my financial planning business, Fairhaven Wealth, with a similar philosophy. Fixed fees, no platforms, no opaque calculations, no perverse incentives. Same with this blog: no advertising third party products or services, no affiliate links, or the like. That instinct carries through into how I build software.

Who Snoopy isn’t for

A corollary of “does one thing”: Snoopy probably isn’t the right fit if you want:

  • Automatic bank feeds (Snoopy works off CSVs you export yourself).
  • Investment or net worth tracking.
  • An envelope-style budgeting system with spending limits and categories you have to stick to.
  • A phone-first experience (Snoopy is a desktop app).

Those are real things some people want. They’re just not what Snoopy is. Knowing what a tool isn’t for is often more useful than knowing what it is for.

It’s also worth noting that Snoopy is built with New Zealand users in mind, and that’s where my energy is going right now. It should work fine for anyone with CSV-exportable transactions from overseas banks, but I’m not making any representations about how well it works outside New Zealand. A runaway success overseas before I’ve got it right here would be more problem than win at this stage.

$18 for hundreds of hours

In various past roles, my time has been charged at hundreds of dollars per hour.

I spent hundreds — possibly thousands — of hours on Snoopy. To get the fruits of that labour, you pay $18, one time.

It has driven home to me the strange economics of software. When I was a lawyer or a financial planner, my time was scarce and not easily reproducible. Software inverts that. Years of decision-making, design, and iteration compressed into something that thousands of people can use, all at the same time, for less than a bottle of wine.

The marvel isn’t that it’s cheap. The marvel is that software allows this kind of leverage at all. Both in terms of the ability to create value at scale, as well as the ability to profit from that hard work. In the best case scenario, Snoopy could be incredibly profitable. This is one of the things that attracts me to building software, so I can have more resources to dedicate to the people and causes I value.

The reality, however, is that it’s going to be a hard push to break even on the project. In the same way that most books sell less than 1,000 copies, and the New York Times says that only 2% of books sell more than 5,000 copies, similar dynamics are at play regarding software.

In most cases, the hardest bug to solve with software isn’t technical. The hardest bug is crickets. The biggest challenge is finding a market. And whether Snoopy can do that, remains to be seen. It will depend on people finding out about it, thinking it might be valuable, trying it, and paying for it. And for positive word of mouth to get around.

Which is where you get involved. Can you help me solve this problem?

Try Snoopy

Here’s the pitch. Give Snoopy a go.

Snoopy is free to download and use. Most features are available at no cost, and I plan on keeping it that way. If you want to kick the tyres without uploading anything, there’s a sandbox mode with demo data. You don’t need to use your own financial information to see how it works.

If you find it useful, NZD $18 unlocks everything. That’s it. A single payment to unlock it on that one device, forever.

It’s available on Windows via the Microsoft Store. Mac is on the way.

Click here to view Snoopy on the Microsoft Store website.

I’ve spent years building this. I use it myself, and it scratches the itch I had. I think it’s genuinely good.

If you’ve ever wondered what your spending really looks like, and you wanted a tool that helped you see it clearly, you might find it useful too.

And if Snoopy seems like something other people might want as well? Please let them know. Help me solve the crickets problem.