From a Personal Need to a Finished Codebase: Building My Budget Tracker

I built My Budget because I wanted a better way to understand where my money was actually going.

I needed to keep track of my income and expenses, see which categories were taking most of my money, and understand how long it might take me to save enough for different goals.

At first, the idea was pretty simple: record transactions and show some useful numbers.

But while building it, I realised that tracking expenses alone wasn't enough. I needed categories, savings goals, contributions, reports, and a dashboard that could give me a quick picture of my finances.

That became My Budget, a self-hosted personal finance application built with PHP and MySQL.

The project is now finished, and I decided to make the full codebase available as a product rather than turn it into another subscription-based SaaS.

Someone can install it on their own hosting, use it as it is, change the code, add features, rebrand it, or use it as a starting point for another finance product.

For me, one of the interesting parts of building it was seeing how a personal need slowly turned into a complete codebase that could also be useful to other developers and builders.

I'm curious: when you build something for yourself, at what point do you start thinking it could become a product for other people?