Pulse Local is a budgeting app for Mac with Apple Silicon, currently in beta, that answers questions about your spending using AI models that run entirely on your machine. Local mode requires no account. Your ledger and your questions stay on the device, and the app sends no analytics or crash logs. Its developer, Niz, says there are too few consumer apps that run locally without contacting the outside world, especially for managing sensitive parts of life.
The app imports a CSV from any bank in any currency. When a user asks a question, a fine-tuned Qwen3 0.6B model turns it into a structured query, and code, not the model, performs the money calculations against the ledger. A 4B checker model then double-checks each money answer. When the two readings disagree, the app says it is not sure instead of guessing. The developer reports this reduced wrong answers from about one in five to 5 in 494 questions across the last three tests.
The app is free. An optional Connected mode, Sync Pass at $29/year, syncs US banks through Plaid, with transactions passing through the server's memory and not stored. The tuned weights are published on Hugging Face.
Limitations include a first-start download of about 2.9 GB of models, and money answers taking 12 to 14 seconds with the checker enabled. Small models can still misread open-ended questions, the app answers only in English, and Mac is the only supported platform for now, with Windows planned next.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing