Pare

The fastest way to have more money is to keep more.

Pare is a privacy-first personal finance app. It parses your bank and credit-card PDF statements into categorized transactions and shows spending trends, cash-flow forecasts, net worth, and budget goals — no account aggregators, no bank logins, no data selling. Your statements, your machine, your data.

Most finance apps work by holding your bank credentials and pulling your data through a third-party aggregator. Pare doesn't. You upload a PDF; a parser reads it; the numbers land in a database only you can reach.

Who it's for

• The Mint refugees. Mint shut down. Pare ingests the same statements without handing your logins to anyone.
• People priced off Monarch / Copilot / YNAB who want the dashboard without the subscription or the cloud sync.
• Privacy-first users who will not connect their bank to a third party — and who want the option to run the whole thing on their own hardware.
• People who already live in the terminal / Claude. Pare ships a finance MCP server, so you can ask Claude about your spending over a local database.

What's live

• Waitlist — pare.money. The hosted, multi-user app is in active development; join the list to get an invite when it opens.
• Self-host — today. The entire app is in this repo and runs on your machine right now. Single-user, local-first, zero network calls. See Self-host quickstart.

Same codebase, two deploy targets. Self-host is not a stripped demo — it's the product, minus the multi-tenant plumbing.

Self-host quickstart

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+ (CI builds on 22)
• Python 3.10+
• poppler (pdftotext) — brew install poppler (macOS) · apt install poppler-utils (Debian/Ubuntu)

Run it

git clone https://github.com/itsgotpower/pare.git
cd pare
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000. First run prompts you to create a profile (the single-user gate). Drop a statement PDF on /upload — Amex, CIBC Visa, or CIBC chequing are supported today — and the dashboard fills in. No statement parser for your bank yet? Most banks let you export .ofx / .qfx ("Download to Quicken/Money"); drop that on /upload instead and Pare reads it directly — deduped on each transaction's bank-assigned ID, so re-importing never doubles up.

Your data lives in data/pare.db (a local SQLite file) plus data/user-rules.json for your category rules. The entire data/ directory is gitignored and never leaves your machine. Keep real statement PDFs outside the repo (the parent directory is fine).

Other commands

npm run mcp                                             # finance MCP server (stdio) over data/pare.db
python3 lib/parser/parse_statements.py <dir> --json     # run the PDF parser standalone
python3 lib/parser/parse_statements.py --report <pdf>   # single-statement parse report (parser tuning)
npm test                                                # parser regression suite (synthetic fixtures)

See mcp/README.md for wiring the MCP server into Claude, docs/parser-contributions.md for tuning your bank's statement parser against your own PDFs, and CONTRIBUTING.md for tests and the PR flow.

Architecture

One query layer (lib/db) sits behind an async Repo seam, so the same SQL runs on both targets — the deploy target just picks the backend.

	Self-host (today)	Hosted (Cloudflare)
Runtime	Node (Next.js 16)	Workers via @opennextjs/cloudflare
Per-user data	better-sqlite3 file DB	one Durable Object per user, on native DO SQLite (ctx.storage.sql)
Auth	single-user gate (scrypt + HMAC cookie)	better-auth on D1 (email/password, passkeys, password reset, bearer tokens)
PDF parsing	Python + poppler via child_process	Python + poppler in a Cloudflare Container
Upload pipeline	parse inline	R2 (store) → Queues (job) → Container (parse) → write to user's DO → PDF deleted

Hosted (Cloudflare)                          Self-host (your machine)
─────────────────────────────────────        ──────────────────────────────
Next.js 16 (App Router) on Workers            Next.js 16 (App Router) on Node
   │                                             │
   ├─ better-auth on D1                          ├─ single-user gate (HMAC cookie)
   ├─ per-user Durable Object (SQLite)           ├─ better-sqlite3 file DB
   └─ upload: R2 → Queue → Container             └─ upload: parse inline
                       (Python + poppler)                       (Python + poppler)

Tenant isolation is by construction. In hosted mode a request routes to exactly one user's Durable Object, each backed by its own SQLite database. A forgotten WHERE user_id = ? can't leak another account's rows — that class of bug doesn't exist here.

Stack: Next.js 16 · TypeScript · SQLite (better-sqlite3 / native DO SQLite) · Python 3 + poppler · Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, D1, R2, Queues, Containers · Recharts · Tailwind CSS 4 + shadcn/ui (brutalist bento theme).

Privacy posture

Concrete, not a slogan:

• No aggregators, no bank logins. Pare never touches your credentials. It reads statement PDFs you already have.
• Per-user isolation in the hosted app. Every account gets its own Durable Object database — physical separation, not a shared table with a user_id column.
• PDFs are ephemeral in the hosted pipeline. An uploaded PDF is parsed and then deleted from R2 — only the extracted rows persist.
• No data selling. No ad tech. There is no business model that involves your transactions leaving your control.
• Self-host = fully local. Run it yourself and there are zero outbound calls; your DB is a file on your disk.

See SECURITY.md for the data-handling rules and how to report a vulnerability.

Status

• Rebrand Parse → Pare: done.
• Self-host: shipping today — PDF parsing, categorization, dashboard, forecasts, net worth, goals, MCP server.
• Hosted (Cloudflare): built through Phase 4 hardening — multi-user better-auth, per-user Durable Object SQLite, the R2 + Queues + Container upload pipeline, rate limiting, Turnstile, error tracking, and account deletion.
• Waitlist: live at pare.money.
• Full public launch: held on a few prerequisites — provisioning the production Cloudflare resources, a custom domain, and billing. Self-host mode and the MCP server stay green throughout; hosted is additive, not a fork.

Links

• Waitlist / product: pare.money
• Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Security & privacy: SECURITY.md
• License: AGPL-3.0 core, proprietary cloud/

License

Open core. Everything in this repository is licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0 except the cloud/ directory — the hosted-product layer (billing, hosted email ingest, metering), which is source-visible but proprietary under its own commercial license.

The AGPL core is the complete self-hosted product; nothing in cloud/ is required to run it. Run it, modify it, self-host it — and if you offer a modified version as a network service, you have to share your source with its users.

Copyright (C) 2026 pare.money.