tare.money
A personal finance tool built around a single, honest question: after you account for the fixed cost of just being alive, what are you actually spending on the life you want?
Above tare
$640
discretionary this month
Tare weight
$3,240
cost of just existing
The Concept
In chemistry, tare is the weight of the container — the thing you have to subtract before you know what you actually have. I applied that idea to personal finance.
Most budgeting apps show you what you spend. tare.money shows you what you spend above baseline. The tare is rent, utilities, groceries, insurance — the fixed cost of being a human who lives somewhere and eats things. Everything above that number is your real discretionary life.
The insight is simple but easy to miss: knowing your total spend isn't very useful. Knowing how much room you have above the floor — that's actionable.
Built With
Lovable
Full-stack app builder — UI, logic, and hosting
Supabase
Auth and database backend
Plaid API
Bank connection and transaction sync
Tailwind CSS
Styling and layout
What I Learned
Building with Lovable accelerated the prototype dramatically — going from concept to working app in days rather than weeks. The tradeoff is that you're working within guardrails, which forces you to be very clear about what the product actually needs versus what would be nice to have.
The hardest UX problem wasn't the math — it was helping users define their own tare. Everyone's baseline is different. What's fixed for one person is discretionary for another. The app needed to be opinionated enough to be useful but flexible enough to be accurate.