6 Months Building in Public: What I've Learned So Far

Late last year, I was an expat in Spain with money scattered across four accounts in two currencies and no way to see where any of it was going. I'd tried about ten different budgeting apps. None of them worked for someone living across borders.

So I decided to build my own. And I decided to do it in public, sharing progress, posting about what worked and what didn't, writing about the problems I was solving along the way.

Here's what I've learned.

The space is exploding, and that's a good sign

When I started, I thought I was building for a niche that nobody else cared about. Multi-currency budgeting? For the handful of people who live across borders? Surely the market is too small.

I was wrong. In the past year, new multi-currency finance apps have been popping up at an astonishing rate. FinPM launched a privacy-first, AI-powered finance tracker with multi-currency support out of Europe, with bank connections listed as coming soon.¹ Lums shipped an AI budget assistant with multi-currency accounts and bank connections in the US and Canada.² Keept and Budgero both took a different angle, deliberately skipping bank connections entirely and positioning that as a privacy feature, with multi-currency support via manual entry.³⁴ Fina Money launched with a Notion-like modular approach to financial dashboards and bank connections limited to the US.⁵ And those are just the ones I've found. There are more launching every month.

My first reaction was competitive anxiety. My second, more rational reaction was: this validates the problem. When half a dozen indie founders all independently decide the same problem is worth solving, it means the problem is real and the existing solutions are genuinely inadequate. YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, and Rocket Money still don't support multiple currencies in any meaningful way.⁶ The market leaders left a gap, and now everyone's rushing to fill it.

"Multi-currency support" is a spectrum

Here's what I've noticed about the new entrants, though: almost none of them connect to banks in multiple countries. Lums and Fina Money have bank connections, but only in the US and Canada.²⁵ FinPM doesn't have bank sync yet.¹ Keept and Budgero made a deliberate choice not to connect to banks at all. They see it as a privacy advantage.³⁴

This isn't a criticism. I understand the reasoning. Connecting to banks, especially across countries, is by far the hardest and most expensive part of building a personal finance app. Even Maybe Finance, a well-funded open-source project, cited bank provider integrations as "the single biggest challenge with a personal finance app in 2025" before archiving their repo.⁷

But there's a meaningful difference between an app that lets you enter expenses in different currencies and an app that connects to your US and European bank accounts, pulls your transactions automatically, categorizes them across languages and currencies, and shows you a unified budget. The first is a useful tool. The second is the actual problem I'm trying to solve.

The European banking wall

The biggest surprise of this entire project has nothing to do with building the product. It's the cost of connecting to European banks.

In the US, bank connectivity is a (relatively) solved problem. But for an app that's built for people living across borders, US-only bank connections aren't enough. I need European banks too. And the European open banking landscape is brutally expensive for startups.

I've contacted every major provider. Salt Edge quoted a minimum of EUR 1,000/month.⁸ Plaid's European pricing starts at $1,000-2,000/month.⁹ Tink, owned by Visa, came back at EUR 4,000-5,000/month. Their website suggests ~EUR 0.50/user/month, which at startup scale turned out to be 80-100x less than the actual minimum commitment.¹⁰ GoCardless/Nordigen, which was the ideal free option, closed to new customers in late 2025.¹¹ TrueLayer sent an automated rejection saying they're "focusing resources on onboarding clients who align with target growth areas."¹²

This is the chicken-and-egg problem of fintech: you need bank connections to get users, but you need users (or funding) to afford bank connections. It explains why every new multi-currency app either skips bank sync entirely or limits it to North America.

I'm not giving up on it. There are smaller providers with more startup-friendly pricing, like finAPI starting at EUR 60/month for 13 EU countries¹³ and Enable Banking with a free restricted mode covering 29 European countries.¹⁴ In the meantime, I shipped a CSV import wizard as a workaround. It works for every bank in the world, even if it's not as seamless as automatic sync. Don't let the perfect solution block you from shipping a good-enough one.

Building in public means being honest about the hard parts

I started sharing progress on Twitter and Reddit early. At first it felt good. Here's a screenshot of the dashboard, here's a feature I just shipped, look at this chart.

But building in public only works if you're honest about the parts that aren't going well. The EU banking pricing that blew up my assumptions. The integration I spent time building for a provider I couldn't afford. The features I had to cut. The moments where I questioned whether anyone would actually pay for this.

Those posts consistently get more engagement than the polished progress updates. People want to see the real thing, not a highlight reel. And being honest about challenges has an unexpected benefit: it creates accountability. When you've publicly said "I'm going to solve this problem," you feel obligated to actually solve it.

Content marketing before you have a product

Before I wrote my first blog post, my instinct was that content marketing before launch is pointless. Who's going to read a blog for a product that doesn't exist yet?

I was wrong. I've published 14 posts, and they're already ranking for search terms that my target users search for. Posts like how to budget in two currencies and common expat budgeting mistakes bring in visitors who have exactly the problem I'm solving. Some of them join the waitlist.

The key is writing posts that are genuinely useful regardless of whether the reader ever uses your product. If someone reads my guide to multi-currency budgeting and walks away with a better spreadsheet setup, that's a win. They'll remember the brand. They might come back later.

SEO compounds over time. The posts you publish three months before launch will be ranking by the time you need them. Start writing before you think you're ready.

What I'd do differently

If I started over, two things would change.

First, I'd research the business side of every integration before writing a single line of code for it. I spent real time building a complete bank connection integration for a provider whose pricing I hadn't confirmed. That code works perfectly and sits unused. Pricing inquiries are free. Send them first.

Second, I'd start the content earlier. I waited a few weeks before publishing blog posts, and those weeks were wasted runway. Every day a post sits unpublished is a day it's not being indexed.

Where things stand

The app works. Bank connections, automatic transaction categorization, spending analytics, multi-currency budgets, recurring charge detection, CSV import. Early access launches in June.

The competitive landscape is busier than I expected, but I'm not worried about it. Most of the new entrants are solving a different version of the problem: AI chatbots with US-only bank connections, privacy-first manual trackers, or receipt scanners with a currency dropdown. Very few are building an actual budgeting app that connects to your banks across countries and gives you a unified view of your money. That's what I'm building, because that's what I need.

If you're an expat, digital nomad, or anyone managing money across borders, the waitlist is open at borderlessbudget.com. You'll get early access and founding member pricing when we launch.

And if you're building something yourself, I'm on Twitter at @borderlessbdgt. I'm always happy to talk about the indie founder experience, the highs, the lows, and the surprisingly expensive world of European open banking.

Related reading:

• Why I Built a Budgeting App After Moving to Spain
• How Borderless Budget Handles Multi-Currency Budgeting
• The Complete Guide to Multi-Currency Budgeting