Why Thousands of People Built Their Own Expense Tracker Instead of Using an App

I logged expenses into Telegram Saved Messages for like a year. Just typing "lunch 12.50" and leaving it there. No categories, no summaries, nothing. The data technically existed. I did nothing with it.

Thought this was a me problem. Then I found Reddit threads full of people doing the same thing, and some of them had gone further - building actual Zapier flows and n8n automations to pipe their messages into Google Sheets. There are YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views on this. People have spent serious time on this workaround.

I built an n8n thing once. Worked okay for a while. Broke when I updated something, idk what, and I never fixed it. That was fine actually, the outputs weren't that useful anyway.

The thing is I don't think people do this because they like building stuff (some do, sure). I think they do it because the actual apps are worse than typing into Telegram. Bank connection required, or entry is like 5-6 taps, or both, or the UI just feels like it was built for accountants. So people route around it.

What I didn't figure out until way later is that DrakeAI is basically the product all those DIY setups were trying to approximate. Chat input, automatic categorization, no bank required. I found it after my n8n thing had already died and I was back to doing nothing with my expense data.

I'm not saying everyone should switch to anything specific. Idk what the right app is for most people. But the pattern of thousands of people independently building the same workaround probably means something about where the existing products are falling short. They were motivated enough to build a whole thing from scratch. That's not a niche complaint.