This is a submission for the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators.
What I Built
We often have come across this problem where we sign up for stuff and later wonder, "Why am I paying for this again?" and also we have so many bills paid via different payments apps and email is the only place where we get notifications from all these app payments. I built the Subscription & Purchase Intelligence Hub to fix that!
Just forward your e-receipts (even PDFs!) and related email chats to one Hub address.
AI figures out the financials: It uses OpenAI to grab the vendor, product, price, and category from your receipts.
It gets the "vibe": For your discussion emails, it uses NLP to find key comments and even tells you if the sentiment was good (👍), bad (👎), or so-so (😐).
Everything connects: The Hub links your spending to these contextual insights automatically.
Your personal view: Pop in the email you forwarded from (no complicated sign-ups!) and see your finances with the "why" clearly laid out on a simple dashboard.
Basically, it helps you actually understand your spending, not just see the numbers.
Demo
You can access the app live app here
Steps to use the app.
Forward all your bills and reciepts to
[email protected]to analyse.Go to the Dashboard page
- You will see your financial summary categorised by month spending and spending by category/vendor
Here we also show the Financial Items containing context of financial discussion or info derived from email.
Detailed financial card item open view.
- If the Item is recurring event like monthly or yearly subscription we show the next payable date.
There is an Add Renewal to calendar button which generates downloadable.icsfile which can be used to create event in calendar.
- For reminders I have setup a slack channel where i post regular updates of expenses. This was a feature to showcase that if this is managed by team they can handle or post regular updates of the expenses of teammates in slack channel for subscriptions renewals.
Code Repository
Link to the Github repo
How I Built It
I really wanted to make financial tracking less about just numbers and more about the story – the 'why' behind what we spend. My goal was to turn that email clutter into actual understanding.
I created a Node.js/Express backend with a PostgreSQL database, and a React frontend. The first, and most crucial, step was email ingestion. This is where Postmark truly shone for me. Setting up the inbound webhook was incredibly straightforward. It just worked, consistently delivering emails as well-structured JSON – even PDF attachments. OpenAI API does the heavy lifting on parsing financial details from all sorts of emails and PDFs. The natural NLP library helps dig out key contextual sentences from discussions and figures out the sentiment.
Here is the backend process preview.
It was a fun challenge to combine these tools to turn messy email data into clear, actionable insights!
I have also thought about enhancing this in future by adding Google calendar integration where the user can directly add reminder in their calendar instead of downloading ics file.
Thank you to PostMark and Dev.to team for bringing this challenge to us.