Montra

Montra helps users track spending, set budgets, and reach financial goals with personalized insights and support for connected accounts and cash expenses.

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Inspiration

Managing personal finances can be overwhelming, especially when expenses come from different sources such as cash, bank cards, and digital payments. Many people struggle to understand where their money goes, stay within their budgets, and make progress toward their financial goals.

We were inspired by a simple question: What if managing money could be smarter, easier, and more personalized?

That question led us to create Montra, an AI-powered personal finance platform that brings everyday spending, budgeting, savings goals, and investment insights together in one place.

Our vision is to go beyond traditional expense tracking and help users understand their financial habits, make informed decisions, and build a better financial future.

What it does

Montra is an AI-powered personal finance management platform designed to help users track their money, plan their savings, and explore investment opportunities through a single dashboard.

The platform includes several key features:

Smart Expense Tracking and Budgeting

Users can record and categorize expenses, including cash and manually entered PayPal payments. They can create category-based budgets, monitor spending, and receive notifications about their financial activity.

AI Financial Assistant

Montra integrates an AI chatbot powered by Cloudflare Workers AI and Llama 3.1.

The assistant helps users:

  • Understand their spending patterns.
  • Ask questions about their financial information.
  • Generate illustrative monthly savings plans.
  • Explore different budgeting scenarios.
  • Understand how changes in savings could affect their goals.

For example, users can ask, "My monthly income is 5,000 EGP. How much should I save?" and explore different savings amounts through interactive conversations.

Savings Goals and Financial Planning

Users can create personalized savings goals, track their progress, and explore estimated timelines for achieving them.

Montra connects everyday financial decisions with long-term goals, helping users see how their spending and saving habits affect their plans.

Investment and Asset Tracking

Montra supports tracking investments and assets, including gold and stocks.

The platform provides available market references, portfolio information, and financial insights to help users understand their assets.

AI-Assisted Stock Research

Montra includes a Stock Recommendations page that displays available real-world stock market data, research signals, volatility indicators, and risk explanations.

Users can explore stocks, ask the AI assistant questions, and review potential opportunities. These signals are educational research tools rather than guaranteed investment recommendations.

Automatic Stock Watch Alerts

Montra checks available stock information periodically while the application is open and generates relevant watchlist alerts through its notification system.

PayPal Sandbox Trading Demo

Users can explore a simulated stock purchasing experience directly from the Stock Recommendations page.

The platform connects the demo purchase flow with PayPal Sandbox, allowing users to experience a payment workflow using test funds.

Real market data is used where available, but stock purchases remain simulated. No real securities are purchased.

Demo Portfolio Performance

Montra calculates estimated portfolio values and unrealized profits or losses for simulated stock holdings using available market prices.

This helps users understand how investment performance can change over time without risking real money.

How we built it

We developed Montra as a web-based financial management platform, combining frontend development, cloud services, database management, financial APIs, and artificial intelligence.

Our technology stack includes:

  • Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for the responsive dashboard and interactive financial features.
  • Backend and Database: Supabase and PostgreSQL for authentication, financial records, and data management.
  • Cloud Hosting: Cloudflare Pages for deploying the web application.
  • AI Integration: Cloudflare Workers AI with Llama 3.1 for conversational financial assistance.
  • Payment Simulation: PayPal Sandbox for testing payment workflows without real transactions.
  • Market Data: Twelve Data and other configured market references for stock and asset information.
  • Version Control: Git and GitHub for source code management and development.

We developed the project incrementally, starting with expense tracking and budgeting, then expanding into savings goals, AI-powered assistance, investment tracking, and simulated stock trading.

Throughout development, we focused on creating a unified experience where financial information could be understood and explored from one dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

1. Integrating Different Financial Services

One of our biggest challenges was understanding how financial information could be brought together from different payment providers.

Not every provider offers the same API capabilities or permissions. We therefore focused on supported integrations and manual transaction tracking rather than claiming automatic synchronization where it was unavailable.

2. Building a Reliable AI Financial Assistant

Integrating AI was more challenging than simply connecting a language model.

We needed the assistant to understand financial context, calculate spending accurately, handle follow-up questions, and avoid making incorrect assumptions about missing information.

We addressed this by combining AI-generated explanations with deterministic calculations for selected financial questions and savings scenarios.

3. Working with Real Market Data

Stock prices change frequently, and market APIs can return delayed, missing, or outdated information.

We needed to handle these limitations carefully and avoid presenting incomplete information as reliable investment advice.

4. Integrating PayPal Sandbox

Building a simulated payment experience required managing payment requests, review flows, redirects, and transaction states.

We also had to distinguish between successful sandbox demonstrations, failed payment captures, and actual financial transactions.

5. Protecting Financial Information

Because Montra handles personal financial records, authentication, access control, and responsible data handling were important considerations throughout development.

6. Connecting Multiple Features

Combining expense tracking, AI, investments, market data, and notifications into one consistent user experience required careful integration and testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is transforming Montra from an initial concept into a deployed, interactive financial management prototype.

We are especially proud of:

  • Building a functional personal finance dashboard with expense tracking, budgets, and savings goals.
  • Integrating an AI financial assistant that can discuss financial information and calculate illustrative savings plans.
  • Connecting real-world market data with stock research and risk explanations.
  • Developing a PayPal Sandbox demonstration for simulated stock purchases.
  • Adding portfolio performance calculations and stock watch notifications.
  • Bringing these features together into a single accessible web application.

What makes Montra meaningful to us is that it connects daily financial habits with future financial decisions, rather than treating spending, saving, and investing as completely separate activities.

What we learned

Building Montra taught us that financial technology is about much more than displaying numbers.

We learned how to integrate cloud services, manage financial data, work with third-party APIs, and build AI-assisted features that provide useful context to users.

We also learned that AI should not be trusted to perform every financial calculation independently. Combining deterministic logic with AI explanations can improve reliability.

Working with stock market data taught us the importance of timestamps, data availability, volatility, and clear risk communication.

PayPal Sandbox helped us understand payment workflows and the distinction between simulated transactions and real financial operations.

Most importantly, we learned that creating a useful financial product requires balancing functionality, security, transparency, and user experience.

What's next for Montra

Our next goal is to improve Montra's reliability, intelligence, and overall user experience.

We plan to:

  • Expand AI financial insights with more detailed spending analysis and personalized budgeting scenarios.
  • Improve stock research using additional financial indicators and historical market information.
  • Develop server-side market monitoring for alerts that can operate even when the application is closed.
  • Introduce investment watchlists and more advanced portfolio performance visualizations.
  • Expand supported financial integrations where appropriate permissions and APIs are available.
  • Strengthen security, automated testing, and data validation.
  • Improve mobile responsiveness and accessibility.

In the longer term, we would like to explore integration with licensed financial institutions and brokerage providers, subject to the required security, regulatory, and compliance requirements.

Our vision is to make Montra more than a finance tracker.

We want Montra to become an intelligent financial companion that helps people understand their money, build better habits, and make more informed financial decisions.

Try Montra

Live Demo: https://montra-61q.pages.dev/

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/malakshetat78/Montra

Montra is currently a prototype. Investment insights are educational, and PayPal Sandbox trading uses simulated funds rather than real securities.

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