--- title: Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI... description: Pulse Local is a budgeting app that runs small open-source language models directly on a Mac (Apple Silicon beta), so that both the user's ledger and their... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-pulse-local-a-mac-budgeting-app-whose-ai-models-run-on-your-machine-unam72owq twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine | daily.dev og:description: Pulse Local is a budgeting app that runs small open-source language models directly on a Mac (Apple Silicon beta), so that both the user's ledger and their... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-pulse-local-a-mac-budgeting-app-whose-ai-models-run-on-your-machine-unam72owq og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/uNAm72oWq.png og:image:alt: Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Pulse Local is a budgeting app that runs small open-source language models directly on a Mac (Apple Silicon beta), so that both the user's ledger and their chat questions never leave the device, unlike other local-first budgeting apps that still send queries to a hosted model. It covers typical budgeting features (plans, targets, rollover, cash flow, forecasting) across 75 countries and currencies, with no currency conversion and English-only chat. Pricing is pay-what-you-want with every feature unlocked at every tier, plus an optional $29/year bank sync pass. The team publishes its tuned model weights on Hugging Face and benchmarks them against cloud models. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 63 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-14). **TL;DR:** Commenters appreciate the on-device/local-first approach and praise the founder's responsiveness, but the discussion is dominated by friction points around CSV import/bank connectivity, transaction categorization UX, and a few early bug reports (freezes, broken filters, column mis-mapping). **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 45% mixed · 25% skeptical **The case for** - The on-device model concept for a budgeting app is seen as a genuinely good idea worth pursuing. - Several people offered concrete integration suggestions (SimpleFin, enablebanking.com, Redbark) showing engaged interest. - The founder's fast, transparent responses to feedback and bugs were well received. **The pushback** - Requiring manual CSV export/import from multiple banks is seen as a major adoption blocker outside the US. - Some found the landing page confusing or overly long with unclear differentiation. - Early testers hit real bugs: frozen UI, broken currency filter dialog, and incorrect CSV column auto-mapping. - The transaction categorization/review flow was called tedious and poorly designed, with no bulk edit option. - One person questioned whether local model processing meaningfully improves privacy given banks already hold the data in the cloud. - Skepticism about trusting an AI 'black box' with financial data, though others pushed back noting all data already passes through black-box systems. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Interest in the local-AI concept and helpful technical suggestions are tempered by real bug reports, UX criticism of the categorization flow, and debate over whether local processing actually improves privacy. **Hottest debate:** Whether running the AI model locally actually provides a meaningful privacy benefit when the underlying bank data is already held by third parties in the cloud. **Open questions** - What brings users back to the app after the first few days, and do they keep using the chat feature regularly? - How often does rephrasing a failed query actually succeed, and do users give up after a 'not sure' response? **Highlights** > I don't know if this is vibe-coded or something, but it works very badly. I tried to change the currency from USD to EUR. The filter dialogue didn't work, clicking it only focused the text field for a few milliseconds and I couldn't get a single character typed. Then I closed the settings, and the whole app froze until I had to force-quit it. Uninstalled already, not a good first impression at all. > — [splittydev on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50083997) > Found the review screen very hard to use. You can't bulk change categories, you have to awkwardly double click into each one. And two thirds of my transactions went in that pile. Brutal. Uninstalled. > — [kailovel on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50084330) > I use budgeting apps on a daily basis, and I'll just share my personal feedback: I'm absolutely not downloading ~3 gigs for a budget app. Everything I need to "ask" the app is already available to me in the form of reports, charts, and tables. I don't really have many open-ended questions about my budget because anything important to track is already handled deterministically. Also yes, it's local but the data you're importing is already with a private organization on the cloud. In that sense, having a local copy of it does not really do anything for me in terms of privacy etc. As I said, I use budgeting apps daily (one for personal use (self-made), another for business (very old freenium era software that has not failed me in the last 5+ years of self-hosting it)) and I do not see any need for generative AI in that workflow from my pov. YMMV > — [altmanaltman on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50080911) > I gave it a go and imported a transaction CSV from my bank - National Australia Bank. 150 row CSV. The Description import column was assigned to the Merchant Name CSV column (the Merchant import column was also assigned to this CSV column) and as a result 25 rows were going to be ignored. Here's the CSV header row: Date,Amount,Account Number,,Transaction Type,Transaction Details,Balance,Category,Merchant Name,Processed On Hand-picking the Description column to be assigned to the details column sorted it out; not sure how you're auto-selecting column mappings but maybe 'details' should be recognised as closer to 'description' than 'merchant name' is. > — [codebje on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082106) > You trust anything run through a black box model to remain private? Laughable. > — [xyst on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081873) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50080275) · 101 points · 63 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [My phone runs an AI assistant entirely offline, and I stopped uploading my documents to cloud chatbots](https://daily.dev/posts/my-phone-runs-an-ai-assistant-entirely-offline-and-i-stopped-uploading-my-documents-to-cloud-chatbo-jxd4me3ze) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Local AI Weekly \#3: The Token Rug Pull](https://daily.dev/posts/local-ai-weekly-3-the-token-rug-pull-h4ipcuev9) · It's Foss · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [I stopped paying for these AI features once I realized my laptop could run them locally](https://daily.dev/posts/i-stopped-paying-for-these-ai-features-once-i-realized-my-laptop-could-run-them-locally-qmyockk2g) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy), [#local-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/local-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-pulse-local-a-mac-budgeting-app-whose-ai-models-run-on-your-machine-unam72owq) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-pulse-local-a-mac-budgeting-app-whose-ai-models-run-on-your-machine-unam72owq","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-pulse-local-a-mac-budgeting-app-whose-ai-models-run-on-your-machine-unam72owq"},"datePublished":"2026-10-14T02:06:30.610Z","dateModified":"2026-10-14T08:46:09.132Z","description":"Pulse Local is a budgeting app that runs small open-source language models directly on a Mac (Apple Silicon beta), so that both the user's ledger and their...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/3fd449b9e6389d75f9976a69811eb613?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/3fd449b9e6389d75f9976a69811eb613?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-pulse-local-a-mac-budgeting-app-whose-ai-models-run-on-your-machine-unam72owq","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"llm,privacy,local-ai","timeRequired":"PT5M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine"}]} ```