I built a free personal finance platform and would love feedback from this community

[Cédric]

Hi everyone,

I'm Cédric, based in Zurich. I've been following Baptiste's blog for a while, and with his permission, I'd like to share a project I've been working on: MyFinanceTools, a free personal finance platform.

I built it because I grew really tired of using a spreadsheet and spending hours on it. I wanted a single place to track everything — portfolio, expenses, and financial planning — without paying for a subscription or handing over my bank credentials. Here's what it offers:

Portfolio tracking across 8 account types (stocks, ETFs, crypto, pensions, real estate, debt, alternatives, cash), with real-time price updates, automatic currency conversion, net worth tracking, ETF overlap analysis, and sector/region exposure breakdowns. It supports 24+ currencies, which I know matters to many of us here in Switzerland dealing with CHF, EUR, and whatever else we may need.



Expense management with shared accounts, expense splitting (equal, percentage, or custom amounts), settle-up calculations, recurring expenses, budgets, and merchant/tag tracking.

Free calculators that work without any signup — compound interest, mortgage, FIRE/financial independence, Monte Carlo simulator, debt payoff (snowball vs. avalanche), asset allocation, growth vs. dividend comparison, and more.

On top of that, there are blog articles, a financial health score, and an achievement system to keep things interesting. The whole platform is available in English, German, French, and Spanish.

The core is free. There's a small premium tier that adds additional features, such as daily portfolio snapshots and extended ETF analytics, dividend payout predictions, and so on. The calculators are completely free forever and don't even require sign-up. Most of the other tracking is free forever as well.


I'd really appreciate any feedback from this community — whether it's features you'd find useful, things that are missing, or anything that could be improved. I'm actively developing it and happy to answer any questions. And of course, anybody who would sign up would be most welcome!

Thanks, and thanks to Baptiste for allowing me to share this here!

 

[gaijin]

First of all, thanks for creating and sharing your thoughts and tools! I really appreciate this. I understand that this a tool that satisfies your personal needs in an (almost) perfect way. Which is absolutely what it should do. And I also fully understand and support that you would like to make little or a lot money with it.

Having said this, opening a tool to the public and asking for money is a completely different thing than using it for your own personal needs. My feedback is based on this assumption. I signed up for the tool and played around with it. My conclusion is that it's not for me and my personal needs and wishes. Some technical aspects:

• At the point of sign up, I would have loved an introduction, inviting me to set some parameters at the very beginning, rather than having to set them manually at any later stage. Especially the choice of reference currency.
• The lack of continuous refresh of my overall portfolio (you call it snapshot) is a serious drawback. I would like to immediately see the updates to my portfolio when I enter new information. This lack of updates also means that simulations are not possible in real time.
• I don't need the achievements. They distract and require unnecessary attention. For me, finance should not be gamified.
• The tools seems to me very US focused. Which makes me fear that I would need a lot of time to enter Swiss specifics in a meaningful way. I would love a tool that gives me the impression that it knows about Swiss financial laws and customs and has it integrated into the tool.
• Your free tools and calculators seems to be standalone, the don't take any information from my portfolio. Makes sense from a technical and privacy standpoint, but significantly reduces the value for me.
• From a new user perspective, I find it confusing and not intuitive. As an example, I still see a net worth of 0$ on my start page even though I entered information about cash and stock yesterday and changed the currency to CHF.

All of the above is technical. However, the following ones are more critical to me and the reason why I would not recommend your tool at this point:

• Your communication focuses very much on the tool being free. To me, this is disingenuous. To me, 'free' would imply 'completely free'. But it's not completely free. As a logged in user and throughout the tool I am reminded of feature that I would get when subscribing to premium. So I feel a very strong push for premium. I therefore feel that your marketing and your tool are not in sync.
• When checking further if I can trust you with my information, I looked at your blog posts and the privacy policy. As with the tool, the blog seems quite US oriented. I also find it hard to read since it's mostly bullet points with general statements, and very few concrete Swiss examples or recommendations.
• On the privacy policy you write: 'My Finance Tools does not collect personal information from users.'. Maybe I am showing a lack of legal knowledge of 'personal information'. But to me, storing all my accounts, my assets, my fortune, my pension means that you are storing a lot of my very personal information.

 

[Cédric]

First of all, thanks for creating and sharing your thoughts and tools! I really appreciate this. I understand that this a tool that satisfies your personal needs in an (almost) perfect way. Which is absolutely what it should do. And I also fully understand and support that you would like to make little or a lot money with it.

Having said this, opening a tool to the public and asking for money is a completely different thing than using it for your own personal needs. My feedback is based on this assumption. I signed up for the tool and played around with it. My conclusion is that it's not for me and my personal needs and wishes. Some technical aspects:

• At the point of sign up, I would have loved an introduction, inviting me to set some parameters at the very beginning, rather than having to set them manually at any later stage. Especially the choice of reference currency.
• The lack of continuous refresh of my overall portfolio (you call it snapshot) is a serious drawback. I would like to immediately see the updates to my portfolio when I enter new information. This lack of updates also means that simulations are not possible in real time.
• I don't need the achievements. They distract and require unnecessary attention. For me, finance should not be gamified.
• The tools seems to me very US focused. Which makes me fear that I would need a lot of time to enter Swiss specifics in a meaningful way. I would love a tool that gives me the impression that it knows about Swiss financial laws and customs and has it integrated into the tool.
• Your free tools and calculators seems to be standalone, the don't take any information from my portfolio. Makes sense from a technical and privacy standpoint, but significantly reduces the value for me.
• From a new user perspective, I find it confusing and not intuitive. As an example, I still see a net worth of 0$ on my start page even though I entered information about cash and stock yesterday and changed the currency to CHF.

All of the above is technical. However, the following ones are more critical to me and the reason why I would not recommend your tool at this point:

• Your communication focuses very much on the tool being free. To me, this is disingenuous. To me, 'free' would imply 'completely free'. But it's not completely free. As a logged in user and throughout the tool I am reminded of feature that I would get when subscribing to premium. So I feel a very strong push for premium. I therefore feel that your marketing and your tool are not in sync.
• When checking further if I can trust you with my information, I looked at your blog posts and the privacy policy. As with the tool, the blog seems quite US oriented. I also find it hard to read since it's mostly bullet points with general statements, and very few concrete Swiss examples or recommendations.
• On the privacy policy you write: 'My Finance Tools does not collect personal information from users.'. Maybe I am showing a lack of legal knowledge of 'personal information'. But to me, storing all my accounts, my assets, my fortune, my pension means that you are storing a lot of my very personal information.

Thank you very much for this thorough review! I understand it's not only positive, but with the points you've raised, I can actually work on improvements, so I very much appreciate that.

Here are my answers to the topics you've raised:

Introduction required: Absolutely, a valid point. This is always something we forget as solo developers, as to us, everything is obvious (because we built the platform). I will create something that users will have a guide when they sign up.

Snapshot refreshes: It's very strange that you've not had any refreshes. Currently, any new addition or update of any account would trigger a new snapshot to be created. In order to save ressources, a new snapshot is created only when the past one is at least 15 minutes old for free users, and 5 minutes for premium. This is because this can become quite a heavy operation if there are many accounts. Also, there is the option to request one additional daily snapshot for free users as well. But, I will take your points into account.

Achievements: I understand. Some people like that. I guess those that don't can just ignore them. This forum has them as well.

US focus: This one, I don't quite understand. On the blog, yes, certainly, there is a bit of a focus on the US (even though I try to limit that), but that's because that's a big target group. However, once you're in the tool, what exactly is US focused? I think the tools and tracking options are all country-agnostic, really. And this also applies to CH, where I don't really want to put too much focus on, just because I happen to live here.

Tools receiving inputs from accounts: This is actually a feature already. If you enter your information, some accounts, etc., and then go to the FIRE calculator for example, you would see your data reflected. Granted, not all tools have this yet.

Paid features: As you've correctly stated, there is the option to pay a bit (I think that the pricing is reasonable). For now, this would really be to support the platform, rather than me becoming rich from it. If that changes, that'd be great though. However, I do believe that there is an awful lof of value provided for free as well. Essentially, all tracking is free, and that's quite a bit, in my opinion. I will think about whether that push for premium singups should maybe be dialed down a bit, in the portfolio overview for example.

Privacy policy: Yep, that's a relic from when the site only had the tools. I will need to update that, thanks for pointing it out!

I hope I do not seem defensive here when I state my case. Again, I really appreciate the in-depth analysis you have done. If you want to give the program another shot, I'd be very happy about it, and any additional feedback as well. This is the only way I can make the platform better!

 

[gaijin]

However, once you're in the tool, what exactly is US focused?

See the screenshots. It's partly US focused, partly country-agnostic. Both requires additional effort by the user to fit into the Swiss system.

Cash account: the selection is US based.
Debt account: Credit card and student loan are much more common in the US than in Switzerland
Pension account: would be great to clearly identify the Swiss system of 1st, 2nd and 3rd pillar
Investment Account: the selection is US based.

 

[Cédric]

See the screenshots. It's partly US focused, partly country-agnostic. Both requires additional effort by the user to fit into the Swiss system.

Cash account: the selection is US based.
Debt account: Credit card and student loan are much more common in the US than in Switzerland
Pension account: would be great to clearly identify the Swiss system of 1st, 2nd and 3rd pillar
Investment Account: the selection is US based.

So, like I said, I took your feedback to heart!


In general, here are all the changes:
1) New users will get an introduction, or at least some information will be asked of them, so that the next steps are tailor made for them (i.e., currency and geography, see screenshot)
2) Achievements and gamification is also asked whether the user wants that for them. If they don't, no achievements will be shown.
3) US focus, gone. 10+ countries now have the labels that make most sense to them. For cash accounts, I still have checkings and savings, because that's what we have here as well, and I also didn't remove student loans or car loans (because I actually do know people here who have both). But pension and investment account types are now Swiss.
4) All tools now have the information from their profile reflected in the calculators (if the correct information has been filled in, of course)
5) The platform has been made less pushy towards premium, I think.
6) Privacy policy has been updated.

So, I just want to reflect - I do listen to the feedback. If you see any other reasons not to use the tool, I would be very interested, because as you can see, I want to make the tool as useful as possible, for everybody!

Thanks again either way, as I believe your analysis has already nudged me to make the platform better!

 

[gaijin]

So, I just want to reflect - I do listen to the feedback.

Yes, you have convinced me. I'm now at a point that I will recommend your platform to people where I see that they would benefit from it.

Some more feedback: adding a new position does not feel intuitive. There is no (immediate) feedback if the position is recognized by the system or not. If it's recognized by the system I feel that I have entered too much information (e.g. currency or current price). If the position is not recognized by the system, it's less useful. As an example: will the system recognize all funds that are used by Finpension and Viac? This would help my use case to have an overview of my investments including my 3a investments.

Another question: why is my portfolio at 0 even though I have entered cash and investments? See screenshots.

 

[Cédric]

Yeah, I've been thinking about how I can potentially change this a bit, so that if a user enters a Ticker and then an exchange, it would refill the rest. Something I need to think about some more. As for viac etc., I'm not sure what they have. I have frankly, but I put that in the pension with the not detailed items. The reason is that I don't have direct control.

As for the snapshots, this is the difference between premium and free accounts. I have now forced a snapshot creation for every single user, so you probably have one now. Otherwise, for most users, it would create a snapshot on Sundays.

 

[gaijin]

The reason is that I don't have direct control.

Can't you specify individual funds with Frankly (I'm asking since you can do that with Viac and Finpension).
Anyhow, I still consider my 3rd pillar investment part of my overall investment. I can still control it at least partly (I can chose a strategy, with Viac and Finpension even down to individual funds) plus I am looking into using my 3a for tax optimization, i.e. using 3a for the most tax heavy investments (Swiss stocks with dividends).

As for the snapshots, this is the difference between premium and free accounts.

I see. Thanks for creating a snapshot, I can now see a value for my portfolio.
Still, I would challenge you on this model. I personally think that updated numbers of the existing portfolio are one of the most basic features of your tool. You provide so many ways to really consolidate all assets, income and expenses. If I add an expense on Monday, I will only see its effect in a week. Similarly, when there is a large movement at the stock market on Monday, I will only see that in a week.
As a thought: instead of real time portfolio updates, why not make more features fully premium (e.g. expense tracking or the goals.). Also, real time data for investments (bond, stock, ETF) could be premium. As a free user, I start by entering much or all my information into the tool. Not seeing the total value of what I entered stops me at a very early stage of using your tool.


Another small detail: in your free plan you list some features that are not available in free (gray 'x'). Why not just focus on the features that are available in each plan?

 

[Cédric]

Can't you specify individual funds with Frankly (I'm asking since you can do that with Viac and Finpension).

Not as far as I know. I mean, you can select a certain percentage of stocks or something, but it's only the one fund I think. Not sure, because I invest my new funds in truewealth. Here it's the same, I just consider it as a whole package, so it's simple mode.

I have now made a pretty big change in how you add stocks. If you have the isin, you should be able to find pretty much anything. It also works with free text, or the ticker, but those can be pretty long and complicated on those funds. Also regarding your other suggestion on simplifying the stock position addition, I think it's now vastly improved. A lot more is prefilled, and you are made aware that you don't need to put the current price yourself, only the price you paid. I hope it's better and more intuitive. It's definitely less error prone in the backend for the system.

You're also right, I will make those changes on the pricing. Soon, as that's currently mostly a cosmetic topic.

As for the model, I think it's currently pretty fair (just so you know, a new snapshot is created when you add something, so you wouldn't need to wait a whole week). In between days, if you have nothing to add, you can just generate one daily free snapshot. It's only the automated ones which are weekly. For most people, that's already plenty enough.

 

[Cédric]

Hi everyone,

It has been seven months since this thread went quiet, and a lot of what you pushed me on back in February has shaped what I built since. So here is an update, starting with the Swiss-specific work, since "it doesn't feel like it knows Switzerland" was the most important point you made.

Swiss Retirement Simulator (free, no signup)
This is the biggest one. It takes all three pillars and tells you, in today's money, whether they cover the monthly spending you want in retirement. AHV is estimated from the Rentenskala 44 formula, with contribution gaps, early or deferred claiming and an optional safety haircut if you don't fully trust the system. The pension fund part uses the statutory age credits (or the figure from your pension certificate), buy-ins, your conversion rate, and lets you compare annuity vs lump sum. Pillar 3a supports up to five accounts, paid out one per year before retirement, and the payout schedule shows the capital withdrawal tax of each one (federal one-fifth rate plus your canton), so you can see what staggering actually saves you. Pensions are taxed at your canton's rate, there is a partner section for couples, a "what if I stopped at 60 / 63 / 67" row, and you can pin a scenario and compare it against another one.
https://myfinancetools.io/retirement-simulator-switzerland/

The same simulator, fed by your own accounts
If you are signed in and have your 2nd pillar, 3a and vested benefits accounts in the tracker, you no longer have to type anything. The dashboard now shows a Swiss retirement verdict: projected monthly income vs your spending target, how much of it is covered, and until what age your capital lasts. You confirm salary, canton and marital status once, and that's it. It also flags a few things worth your attention, for example a single 3a account above CHF 100k (where staggering over several accounts would save tax), or retiring before 58. There is also a full retirement plan page where your balances, 3a and savings plans come in automatically, and only the choices you change (retirement age, payout form, buy-ins...) are saved. Your "Path to FI" date now includes AHV and the pension fund too, instead of only a 25x number. The screenshot below gives the first part of it, but there's actually a lot more, depending on the configurations chosen.


Pillar 3a tax savings calculator
Enter your canton, taxable income and 3a contribution, and it shows the tax you save this year, split into federal, cantonal and communal tax (church tax optional), plus what the 3a pot could be worth at withdrawal. It runs on the official ESTV tax tariffs for 2026 for all 26 cantons, and I checked the engine against the official ESTV tax calculator canton by canton until the results matched to the franc. It already knows the 2026 limits (7,258 with a pension fund, 20% of income up to 36,288 without).
https://myfinancetools.io/pillar-3a-calculator/


Swiss account types and imports
Since your screenshots, the account types follow your country: in Switzerland you now get pension fund (BVG), pillar 3a, pillar 3b and vested benefits accounts, and "3a securities" as its own investment account type, so a VIAC or finpension 3a with individual funds can sit next to your normal broker. Stock search works by ISIN, ticker or name, with SIX prices updating automatically. Funds that have a public listing are found by ISIN; some of the index funds 3a providers use have no public price, and for those the simple pension balance is still the practical option. You can also import your history from a CSV or Excel file, and Swissquote now has a built-in preset (alongside Interactive Brokers, DEGIRO, Scalable Capital, Trading 212, Revolut and Parqet).

Home affordability and rent vs buy
The affordability tool uses the actual Swiss bank rules: 5% imputed interest, the 1/3 Tragbarkeit limit, 1% maintenance, at least 20% down with at most half of it from your pension, and amortisation down to 2/3 within 15 years. It shows your maximum purchase price for Zug, Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Lucerne, Lugano, Basel, Bern and St. Gallen. Extra equity above 20% now correctly raises the price you can afford (that was a bug until July). The rent vs buy calculator also has a Swiss preset with a break-even chart.

Swiss data pages
Where your income and your net worth rank in Switzerland, what a child actually costs (based on the Zurich Kinderkosten table), and a dashboard card that shows your percentile in the Swiss wealth distribution. There is also a page that shows 25 years of the franc against 30+ currencies, which is quite satisfying to look at as a CHF holder.

Everything else, in short

• Onboarding: new accounts get a short setup wizard (currency, country, whether you want achievements at all). If you say no, you never see them.
• Import and export: bring in balances, transactions and expenses from CSV or Excel, and export all your data to CSV at any time, on the free plan too.
• Demo portfolio: you can click through a fully filled-in portfolio without signing up.
• Free ETF tools: an ETF overlap tool and side-by-side ETF comparisons (holdings overlap, fees, domicile), no account needed.
• Portfolio analysis: your performance against the S&P 500, MSCI World or any stock you hold, Sharpe ratio, and the weighted TER of your portfolio with what the fees cost you over 30 years.
• Watchlist for stocks and ETFs you don't own yet (price alerts are Premium).
• Rebalancing suggestions (Premium): what to buy or sell to get back to your target allocation, and where your next contribution should go.
• New calculators: Coast FIRE, rent vs buy, a 2-minute financial health score and a financial literacy test. Calculator scenarios can now be saved to your dashboard.
• AI Advisor, notification bell for new snapshots, the app installs on your phone like a normal app, and the site is now also in Portuguese (five languages).

On the snapshot point we discussed: to be transparent, that model is unchanged. Free accounts get a weekly automatic snapshot, a new one whenever you add or change something, and one manual snapshot per day. Premium is daily.

As before, any feedback is welcome, especially from people who have gone through a Pensionskasse certificate or a 3a withdrawal plan and can tell me whether the simulator matches what they expected. And thanks again, gaijin: your review was directly responsible for a good part of this list.

Cédric