Obaachan's Ledger

Inspiration

• I always wanted to use money the right way. But it's such a hard topic. Lots of people talk about it, lots of advice, lots of apps claim to fix it if you just provide some data.
• Most finance apps make me feel judged. Red warnings when I overspend. Guilt when I check my balance. An automated log of expenses — but no idea how to actually fix anything.
• Because we humans are made of emotions. Every decision made in the moment made sense then. Not always later.
• I see this with my friends, people around me. In this highly automated, auto-pilot life — it's hard to find control because we're always running. We don't want someone to solve our problems. We want a support system while we face them.
• That's exactly what I wanted to build.
• I found the answer in an unexpected place — a 1904 Japanese budgeting practice called Kakeibo, used by housewives to manage household finances with intention, reflection, and zero judgment. And I thought — what if this had a face? What if it was a warm, wise Japanese grandmother who simply sat beside you, noticed your patterns, and never once made you feel bad?

Obaachan's Ledger was born.

What It Does

• Obaachan's Ledger is a mindful personal finance companion — not another expense tracker. Every month starts with a ritual. You enter your income. 20% flows automatically into two savings jars — a Future Wealth jar that grows forever, and a personal goal jar for whatever you're dreaming toward. The rest fills four paper envelopes: Needs, Wants, Culture, and Unexpected.
• Every day, you log what you spent — and how it felt. Happy. Grateful. Stressed. Bored. Each log lights a paper lantern. Miss a day, it dims. Come back, it glows again. No shame.
• Every weekend, a weekly reflection. You review your week, mark any purchase as a regret, tag the emotion that drove it — FOMO, boredom, social pressure. Obaachan writes you a short personal letter based on your actual data.
• Every month end, a closing ceremony. Nine screens. Obaachan's letter. Your emotion map. Your Culture Gallery Wall — every book, class, and experience you invested in yourself, displayed like a hall of quiet pride. And if money is left unspent, you decide where it goes.
• The Mottainai section teaches you to pause before buying — write it down, wait three days, then decide. - The Gratitude journal reminds you what money gave you, not just what it cost. The Insights tab shows you patterns you never noticed — which emotions drive your spending, whether regrets are getting fewer, how mindful this week really was.
• And through all of it — Obaachan. Warm, wise, always there. Never judging. Always noticing.

How I Built It

• Built entirely on MeDo — no coding background, just product thinking and iterative prompting.
• I spent day one writing the full product philosophy, user journeys, and feature logic in detail. Then I built screen by screen with MeDo — refining, fixing, iterating.
• The most impressive thing MeDo generated was the monthly closing ceremony — nine connected screens with real data, AI-generated personal letters from Obaachan, the Culture Gallery Wall, and the dual jar allocation at month end.
• The LLM skill integration made Obaachan genuinely alive — she reads your actual ledger and responds to what she finds. Not a script. A real response.
• Login skill gave every user their own persistent ledger across devices.
• I used data analysis skill to power my analytics and insights.

Challenges We Ran Into

• Making something feel warm in a product that handles money — that's hard. Every design decision, every copy choice, every color had to earn its place.
• Getting MeDo to handle complex connected flows — the monthly close, the weekly reflection with real data flowing through five steps, the emotion analytics — required very precise, detailed prompting. Vague prompts gave generic results. Specificity gave magic.
• The streak logic, the savings jar auto-contribution, the allocation percentages staying consistent across the whole app — these took multiple iterations to get right.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

• The Culture Gallery Wall. The idea that every book you read, every class you took, every museum you visited gets displayed as a framed item on a warm wooden shelf at month end — that's the moment in the demo that makes people stop.
• Obaachan's voice. Getting an AI character to feel genuinely warm and not generic took a lot of prompt craft. She reads your actual data. She notices things. She sounds like someone who cares. Building a full-stack product — with database, authentication, responsive web and mobile layouts, AI integration, and complex multi-screen flows — with zero code written by hand.

What We Learned

• Emotions and money are inseparable. Any app that ignores the emotional layer of spending is solving only half the problem.
• Philosophy first, features second. Every feature in this app exists because the Kakeibo philosophy demanded it — not because it seemed like a good idea. MeDo is genuinely powerful when you know exactly what you want. The quality of the output is a direct reflection of the quality of your thinking going in.

What's Next for Obaachan's Ledger

• The 1% Challenge — at month end, Obaachan suggests one small, specific improvement for next month based on your actual patterns. Track whether you did it. Celebrate when you do.
• Year in Review — Obaachan's annual letter. A full year of your financial and emotional journey, wrapped in one beautiful closing ceremony.
• Couples mode — shared envelopes and jars for two people building a life together, with separate emotion tracking.
• Mobile app — the daily logging ritual deserves a native experience, although the current web-app is mobile-responsive. I would like to see how to bring it on app store and play store.
• Multi-language — the Kakeibo philosophy belongs to everyone. Not just English speakers.

Built With

• medo