TimeLedger

Inspiration

Most budgeting tools treat money as the only metric that matters. But money is renewable — time isn’t.
The idea came from a simple question: What if every purchase showed how much of your life it actually cost?

That question led to TimeLedger — a minimalist personal finance app that reframes spending in terms of hours instead of money. Time, not money, becomes the lens for financial clarity.

What it does

TimeLedger helps users understand their true cost of spending by showing every transaction in time equivalents, not just currency.
Users link their bank accounts, and transactions are automatically imported and categorized. Each expense shows how many hours of life it cost based on a customizable hourly rate.

The app includes a time-first dashboard, a transaction timeline, and bank account management — all in a clean, distraction-free black-and-white interface.

How we built it

TimeLedger was built using bolt.new, which made development feel like prompting the future into existence.

Frontend:

Bolt + Vite + React
React Router v6 with dot routing
Mantine UI for styling and component system

Backend:

Fastify (TypeScript) for speed and clarity
Zod for schema validation and API typing
Supabase for PostgreSQL and user authentication
Plaid for real-time bank integrations
Stripe for subscription payments via hosted checkout

The system supports both global and category-specific time-value rates, and is designed to scale as we add more behavioral insights.

Challenges we ran into

The most technically complex part was designing a flexible time-cost model:

Supporting both global and per-category hourly rates
Handling edge cases like refunds, transfers, and ignored transactions
Ensuring calculations were fast and accurate without adding friction

Other challenges included securely integrating Plaid, structuring the database to track account-level permissions, and keeping the UI minimalist without losing clarity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Reframing personal finance through time instead of money
Building a clean, cohesive product as a solo founder within the hackathon window
Using Bolt to move at a pace that felt like prototyping at the speed of thought

What we learned

People immediately connect with the idea — asking them how many hours their takeaway cost makes them stop and think
The psychology of time-as-cost is a powerful lever to drive behavior change
Bolt.new is genuinely transformative for frontend development — it removed almost all boilerplate and let the product vision lead