Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine

# Pulse Local: budgeting that never leaves your machine Source: [https://pulseos.finance/](https://pulseos.finance/) ## “Local” usually means your data\. Not your question\. Your ledger sits on your disk\. Then you ask something, and the question plus the rows that answer it go to a hosted model\. ## Ask about your money\. Keep the conversation private\. Find out where your money went, compare months, or check what is left in your budget\. Supported spending answers are calculated from your transactions and read twice before a figure is shown\. Check the month and category\.Labels above spending answers show what Pulse included\. Select one to change it\. Keep the conversation going\.Ask “by merchant” for a breakdown, or name another month to compare\. Your decisions stay yours\.Pulse explains your figures and everyday budgeting terms\. What to do about them is up to you\. Know the limits\.Pulse can misunderstand a question\. When its two readings disagree it says it is not sure instead of guessing, and AI answers are labelled\. ## See what you can ask\. Then make it your own\. These are real replies from the app, run on sample transactions\. The follow\-up questions show how to break an amount down or compare it with another month\. AskSeptember 2026 Pick a question on the right\. The replies are real: each one came out of the app, answered against a sample ledger\. 0asked0double\-checked0written by the model0 B sent ## A complete budgeting app\. Not a privacy demo\. Plans and targets, rules, rollover, splits, cash flow, forecast\. It covers the ground the most used budgeting apps cover, and does all of it on your machine\.  Spending\.One figure for the month, and every category against its plan\.Sample data\. The money maths was checked against six months of a real ledger, month by month, and matchedto the cent\. ## Same app\. Any price\. You pick\. We are a small team of ML practitioners and product people\. Once Pulse Local is on your machine it costs us nothing to run, so you can help us keep doing this, or use it for free\. Every feature, either way\. Use it free $0 Every feature, no account, no nagging\. Help us build $20 A thank\-you that pays for the next release\. Keep it going $40 For the people who want this to exist for years\. Your call Any Type the number yourself\. One dollar counts\. Every button ends at the same download; the paid ones come straight back here with it ready\. One payment, not a subscription, and nothing in the app checks which one you chose\. Bank sync is the one thing with a running cost on our side, so it is the one thing with a price of its own: the Sync Pass, $29 a year\. Beta for Mac with Apple Silicon, signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens like any other app and keeps itself up to date\. On Windows?[Tell us](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Pulse%20Local%20beta&body=Which%20machine%20do%20you%20run%3F)and we will write when it is ready\. ### Once it is on your machine ## What you give up\. You import a CSV, from any bank in any currency\. A live feed means a server holding your credential\. One machine\. Your ledger exists nowhere else\. Windows is next\. The app answers in English\. Older Intel Macs are not supported\. Small models, careful answers On open questions they are worse than a frontier model, so code does most of the work\. With the check on, a money answer takes 12 to 14 seconds, and when its two readings differ Pulse says it is not sure\.