I got frustrated that school covers personal finance for one semester and most kids forget it by graduation. So I spent the last several months building Finly — a free financial literacy platform for kids ages 8-17.
What I built:
90+ lessons across budgeting, credit, taxes, investing, and finance careers (IB, VC, PE, quant)
Two age tiers: 8-12 and 13-17 with completely different content
XP system, streaks, leaderboard, Money Personality Quiz
Stock portfolio simulator — invest $10,000 in real historical S&P 500 data and watch it play out week by week with market events
Classes system for teachers and parents to assign lessons and track progress
190 Playwright tests
Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Vercel
Where I used AI:
I used Claude Code for a lot of the implementation. The curriculum design, lesson structure, and content were based on notes I took from my personal finance class and videos I watched. I used AI to flesh out those notes into full lessons and to adapt them for two age tiers. That's where things fell apart: the AI made the content way more wordy and abstract than I intended and some lessons stopped actually explaining the topic. Got called out for it on HN today, which was fair.
The hard parts:
Building the portfolio simulator meant downloading 3 years of daily price data for 503 S&P 500 tickers and migrating it to Supabase
COPPA compliance for under-13 users
Getting the two age tiers to feel genuinely different, not just simplified
Posted on Hacker News today and got 839 visitors in a few hours.
No ads, no paywall, no account needed to start. Incorporated as a nonprofit.
learnfinly.com
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