Remiteye: Not showing exact figures, gee I’m not that rich
Introduction
Like many immigrants living abroad, I regularly send money back home for family support and business. I use Remitly, which is a decent app for this sort of thing. But it lacks a dashboard that can give me key insights. I wanted to be able to see exactly over time how much I have sent to each person as well as how much in total I have sent for the year.
Prior to this I had a Python script that would generate a table, but it was quite limited. It had been vibe coded with ChatGPT from ages ago.
Remitly lets me export transaction CSVs for each year so this makes things really easy and I hope they keep the feature. Previously I had to download JSON from their API which was cumbersome. What if they change their API schema? Then of course my Python script would break very badly. I find the CSV option won’t have these problems. Moreover, with the JSON approach I had to cycle through pages to extract all of the different pages’ data contained in the API response. It was tedious.
Wish it and have it, the future is personal software
Enter Remiteye, a personal desktop application that provides detailed insights into my remittance transactions. It really does feel like we are now living in the age of personal software, where you really don’t care about bells and whistles — you just want something that does a particular task for you. This is what Remiteye does for me.
I did think about creating this in the past, but I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I would have to learn about Electron. I felt more emboldened to create it with Claude Code (CC). Within a day I had it doing what I wanted.
People have now described this as throwaway software, but this is actually perfect — I’m not throwing it away. I even had it installed on my Linux machine (Mint).
So really, all you need to do now is wish it, and you can have it, albeit at the cost of tokens. In my case it consumed less than 10 USD with CC credits.
How is this useful to me?
It helps me with budgeting. I set targets for how much I’m willing to sacrifice in terms of remittance.
Conclusion
We might truly be in the age of personal software. The barrier to building software is lowering each day as AI advances. This is wonderful, because software will be ubiquitous and hopefully cheap. Like many immigrants living abroad, I now use Remiteye to keep track of my finances and aid my decision-making. In the past I would have been overwhelmed to create this kind of software, but AI now gives us the confidence to make any piece of software we want. The sky is the limit!