# How to Vibe Code Your Own Hurdlr (and Stop Paying for It)

> Automated Business Expense & Mileage Tracker for Freelancers

- Site: https://hurdlr.com
- Category: Fintech / Accounting
- Verdict: **Serious undertaking** (38/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 4-6 weeks of dedicated engineering

## Verdict

Build a web dashboard clone for personal expense logging, but skip the background mobile GPS tracking and bank aggregators.

At $100 a year, Hurdlr is vastly cheaper to subscribe to than the dozens of hours required to build and debug a cross-platform finance tracker. The real engineering walls here are native background GPS location persistence that does not get killed by mobile OS power management, and managing costly bank data aggregators. If you want a personal weekend hobby project, build a web frontend where you manually upload CSV bank statements and input trips.

### What you can't replicate

- Enterprise bank aggregator agreements and data provider relationships
- Millions of hours of historical transaction categorization training data
- Wholesale real estate brokerage distribution deals

## What it does

Hurdlr automatically tracks business expenses, income streams, billable mileage, and real-time self-employed tax liabilities in the background.

### Core features

- Background GPS mileage tracking with route detection
- Bank account and credit card aggregation syncing
- Rule-based and AI-suggested transaction categorization
- Real-time federal, state, and local tax estimation engine
- Receipt capture with OCR processing
- Invoicing and payment collection workflow
- P&L and Balance Sheet financial reports

## The business

### Pricing

- Free: $0
- Hurdlr Premium: $9.99/mo
- Hurdlr Pro: $16.67/mo

### Funding

$3.2M raised.
- Venture Round (2018)
Investors: TTV Capital

Founded 2012.
Team size: 11-50.

## The hard parts

- Building native background GPS tracking that survives aggressive OS battery killers without draining phone batteries
- Securing direct bank feed aggregator contracts and managing webhook token rotations
- Writing a tax engine that dynamically handles complex multi-state and local self-employment bracket logic
- Training custom categorization classification pipelines over messy ledger string descriptions

## How to vibe code Hurdlr

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Runtime environment for building the Next.js full-stack web application.
- Expo (free): Framework for writing the cross-platform mobile app frontend in TypeScript.
- GitHub (free): Source control and deployment pipeline integration.

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class terminal agent for scaffolding database schemas, API endpoints, and React Native UI views across multi-file codebases.
- Cursor: Ideal AI editor for reviewing UI diffs and tuning complex form layouts and financial charts.

### Stack

- Frontend: React Native with Expo & Next.js web dashboard
- Backend: Next.js API routes / TypeScript server actions
- Database: Turso (SQLite at the edge for low-latency personal data storage)
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: Stripe
- Other: OpenAI API for receipt text extraction, Tailwind CSS for web styling

### Hosting

- Vercel (Hosting the Next.js web dashboard and API backend): $0-20/mo
- Turso (Serverless SQLite database for storing user expenses and trips): $0/mo

### Build guide

1. **Database Schema and Authentication Setup** — Initialize a Next.js project with Tailwind CSS and configure Turso with better-auth to support personal secure login and single-user tenancy tables.

```
Create a new Next.js project with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. Configure better-auth with email/password authentication using Turso as the underlying SQLite database driver. Create database migration files for users, categories, expenses, income, and trips tables with appropriate foreign keys, index fields for user_id and timestamps, and strict typing using TypeScript interfaces.
```

2. **Expense and Income Tracking Module** — Build the core ledger views, CRUD server actions, and categorization tagging interface for manual transactions.

```
Build the core financial ledger features in Next.js. Create React server actions to handle CRUD operations for expenses and income streams. Implement a categorized list view with sorting, filtering by tax category (e.g., meals, software, travel), and a summary card dashboard displaying total revenue, expenses, and net profit for the current month and year-to-date.
```

3. **Receipt Upload and AI OCR Pipeline** — Implement file upload functionality for receipts, backed by an OpenAI vision parsing script that extracts merchant names, amounts, and dates.

```
Implement a receipt upload component using cloud object storage or local storage. Write an API endpoint that takes an uploaded receipt image or PDF, passes it to the OpenAI API with structured JSON output requirements to extract merchant name, transaction date, total amount, and suggested tax category, and automatically populates a new expense record in the Turso database.
```

4. **Self-Employed Tax Estimation Engine** — Develop a calculation engine that processes net business income to estimate federal, state, and self-employment (FICA) tax liabilities dynamically.

```
Build a tax calculation engine module in TypeScript that computes estimated self-employment tax (15.3% on net earnings up to thresholds) and federal income tax brackets based on annualized net profit. Expose a real-time calculation hook used in the dashboard to show users their live quarterly tax estimates and upcoming payment deadlines.
```

5. **Financial Reports and Export Generator** — Construct reporting endpoints and UI screens for Profit & Loss statements and CSV export tools.

```
Create financial reporting views for Profit & Loss (Income Statement) and summary tax deduction reports grouped by IRS schedule C categories. Add a server endpoint that generates and downloads a formatted CSV or PDF export of the filtered transaction ledger for tax season prep.
```

6. **Cross-Platform Mobile Mileage Shell** — Scaffold an Expo React Native companion app for manual trip entry and location route logging.

```
Scaffold an Expo React Native mobile app using file-based routing. Build screens for logging business mileage trips manually with start location, destination, odometer readings, and automatic IRS standard mileage deduction calculations based on current mileage rates. Connect the mobile app authentication flow to the backend Turso database via REST API endpoints.
```

### Cost vs paying

**Starting costs (one-time):**

- AI Coding Assistant (Claude Pro / Cursor): $20
- Total: $20 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- Vercel Hobby & Turso Free Tier: $0/mo
- Total: $0/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: $10/mo
- Build time: 45-60 hours
- AI tool credits: $20
- Break-even: 2 months of subscription value (if ignoring build time)

## Sources

- [Hurdlr Help Center: What is Hurdlr?](https://hurdlr.com)
- [Hurdlr University: Premium Features & Pricing](https://hurdlr.com)