Three months ago, I opened my bank statement and felt that familiar nausea. The numbers were there—transactions, debits, transfers—but the story was missing. Where did my salary go? Why was I always surprised by subscription renewals? And why did that "quick coffee" habit somehow cost me more than my internet bill?
I was bleeding money, and I didn't even know where the wound was.
The Search for a Solution That Doesn't Exist
Like most people who realize they're financially disoriented, I started with the basics. Excel. I built elaborate spreadsheets with color-coded categories and pivot tables that would make an accountant proud. They were beautiful, comprehensive, and completely useless. By day three, manually entering every chai purchase and UPI transfer felt like a part-time job I wasn't getting paid for.
So I migrated to Google Sheets. Better, but still manual. Still clunky. Still requiring me to remember what I bought at 11:47 PM from that random QR code vendor.
Then came the app store rabbit hole. I downloaded everything—expense trackers, budget planners, "AI-powered" finance managers. And honestly? It was depressing. The privacy policies read like surveillance manuals, requesting permissions to scrape my contacts, read my messages, and sell my spending habits to advertisers. The UX felt designed in 2012, all cluttered interfaces and neon green "Add Transaction" buttons that required three taps to find. They were either tracking too much or working too little.
I found myself jumping between three different apps just to understand my own money. One for subscriptions, one for daily expenses, one for investments. None of them talked to each other. None of them respected my data. And absolutely none of them understood that I just wanted to take a photo of my receipt and move on with my life.
The "Fine, I'll Do It Myself" Moment
After deleting yet another app that asked for access to my photo library "to better serve personalized financial advertisements," I closed the Play Store and opened my code editor.
"If I want this done right—private, fast, and actually usable—I guess I have to build it myself."
That was the birth of Lumo. Not as a weekend side project, but as a solution to a problem that was costing me real peace of mind. I didn't want another finance app. I wanted a financial companion that understood the way I actually live: moving fast, spending digitally, and needing insights without sacrificing privacy.
Building the Workflow I Actually Needed
Here's the thing about personal finance that most app developers get wrong: they think people love budgeting. We don't. We love clarity. We love knowing that we're not accidentally spending 40% of our income on food delivery because we forgot to cancel three different subscription services.
So I built Lumo around a single workflow that mirrors my real life: I pay for something—whether it's a bank transfer, card swipe, or UPI payment—I get a receipt or notification, and I want it logged immediately without typing.
Now, my process looks like this: I complete a transaction, take a screenshot of the receipt or notification, and open Lumo. The app extracts the data, categorizes it automatically, and saves it to my timeline. One tap. Maybe two. Then I close the app and get back to living.
No manual entry. No deciphering cryptic merchant names three days later. No wondering whether that ₹2,400 charge was groceries or a深夜 impulse purchase.
But more importantly, the data stays mine. No third-party AI services parsing my spending habits. No algorithms predicting my next purchase to sell to advertisers. Just deterministic, local processing that keeps my financial DNA private.
Three Months of Eating My Own Dog Food
I've been using Lumo daily for the last three months. Not testing it—actually relying on it. And the behavioral change has been subtle but profound.
When you see your spending patterns visualized cleanly—when you can actually watch the graph dip on days you consciously decided not to order in—something shifts. It's no longer about restriction; it's about awareness. The app doesn't yell at me for spending money. It just shows me the truth in real-time, and that honesty has made me naturally more intentional.
I stopped checking my bank balance with dread. Instead, I check Lumo with curiosity. Where is my money going? Is this aligned with what I actually value? The unified view means I can see my subscriptions, daily expenses, and investment contributions in one timeline. No more mental math. No more surprises when the 15th of the month hits and five different services decide to charge me simultaneously.
Why This Matters Beyond Just Another App
Look, I'm not naive. The personal finance app market is crowded. But it's crowded with solutions that treat users as data sources first and humans second. Lumo is different because it was built by someone who was actually frustrated—who was actually losing money to poor visibility and invasive apps.
This isn't a venture-scale play to monetize your financial anxiety. This is a tool built by a software engineer who needed to solve his own problem, and decided to share the solution.
At Syntax Lab Technology, we're not building Lumo to sell your data. We're building it because financial clarity shouldn't require a privacy sacrifice, and good design shouldn't be reserved for social media apps. Your relationship with money is personal—your finance app should respect that.
The Road Ahead
Lumo is still evolving. Every feature I've added in the past three months has come from a real itch I needed to scratch. The one-device policy that keeps your data secure? That came from realizing I don't want my financial history floating across multiple unsecured tablets. The export functionality? That came from the trauma of being locked into previous apps that held my data hostage.
I'm sharing this journey publicly because I think there's a better way to handle personal finance—one that respects both your time and your privacy. If you've ever felt that same frustration, staring at your bank statement wondering where it all went, you're the reason I'm building this.
The app is live. I'm using it every day. And slowly, I'm stopping the bleed.
Abdul Rafay
Founder, Syntax Lab Technology
Building Lumo at syntaxlabtechnology.com
Sharing the journey at rafay99.com & lumo.rafay99.com