Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine

Re:Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models... by niztk on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @11:57PM (#50082220)

Hi, only a Mac app today, working on a Windows app next. As for bank connections, yes this was requested and I added a "Connected Mode" ($29 a year Sync Pass) which syncs US banks via Plaid otherwise you can import a CSV which also works with any bank and any currency. As for Qwen3, 0.6B is small enough to run fast on most laptops, showed good evals and easily tunable. In my tests, the tuned 0.6B model scored about level with gpt-4.1-mini on a dataset of 77 real budgeting questions and outperformed a stock 8B model as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models... by dsjakupov on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:11AM (#50084629)

Ive got a similar story but with slightly harsher constraints. I also want to build private AI app but for the phone. As you know they have very little RAM per app and I needed to somehow circumvent it. So I picked qwen2.5-0.5B as it was good for the purpose of answering people and keeping the dialog and no overkill + whisper model to add stt feature (437 MB for both). I think that if your app does only one job, you can use smaller model and fine tune it a bit

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models... by niztk on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:19AM (#50084687)

Agree, a small tuned model, in my case a 0.6B Qwen, beat a bigger general model: stock 8B Qwen.

[ Parent | on HN ]