Aura - AI Financial Assistant
A full-stack AI-powered personal finance app with smart budgeting, receipt scanning, investment tracking, and an AI chat assistant.
Project Overview
Designed and developed Aura - a full-stack AI personal finance assistant available on iOS, Android, and Web. Aura helps users take full control of their finances through an intelligent AI chat interface, automated transaction categorisation, receipt scanning, investment portfolio tracking, and powerful spending analytics.
The Challenge
Most people struggle to consistently track their spending and understand where their money actually goes. Existing financial apps are either too complex or lack the intelligence to surface meaningful insights. The goal was to build a product that made personal finance feel effortless and even engaging - something users would open every day.
The Solution
Built a comprehensive full-stack application using Astro and React for the frontend, with Node.js and Turso (libSQL) on the backend, deployed on Cloudflare Workers for global edge performance. Implemented an AI chat assistant that understands natural language finance queries, a computer vision pipeline for automatic receipt scanning with 95% accuracy, and a real-time investment tracking dashboard. A freemium pricing model with Pro ($10/mo) and Premium ($20/mo) tiers was designed to convert free users gradually.
Key Features
- AI Chat Assistant - ask natural language questions like 'How much did I spend on restaurants this month?' with full voice input support
- Smart transaction tracking with 95% automatic categorisation accuracy
- AI receipt scanning - photograph any receipt and have it automatically recorded
- Investment portfolio tracking for stocks, crypto, and other assets in one place
- Powerful visual analytics with spending trends, breakdowns, and deep insights
- Partner sharing - connect two accounts for joint budget management
- Multi-platform availability: iOS, Android, and Web with automatic sync
- Bank-level encryption and automatic backups
- Freemium model with a 14-day money-back guarantee on paid plans
Results
Aura is new, but has already generated over 5,000 AI analyses and reached 30+ users with an average rating of 4.9/5. One user reported cutting overspending by 65% and estimates saving over 4,000 KM per year after using Aura to track his spending across 4 months and finding where his money was going.
