How much will I owe Kickstarter this month? For a long time, I had no idea.
I back a lot of campaigns on Kickstarter. Enough that the platform calls me a superbacker, which is what they call you when your backing count crosses some threshold (though I’m not exactly sure what that threshold is). Sometimes a dozen or so of my pledges are still active, in a handful of foreign currencies, due on irregular dates spread across the next few months.
What I always wanted was a single number. Across all those active pledges, in JPY (my home currency), after my bank's foreign-transaction fee — what am I going to owe over the next few months? Useful for budgeting. Useful for deciding whether to back a thing.
But the number doesn't exist anywhere. Kickstarter doesn't aggregate. (Probably good for Kickstarter creators; clearly inconvenient for backers.) Notion templates assume one currency. Budget SaaS assume monthly recurring charges. Nothing I tried knew what to do with one-off pledges that hit the card months later in mixed currencies plus an FTF.
So I built a Livebook notebook that does the math. (Livebook is a free desktop app for interactive Elixir notebooks — you don't need to know Elixir to use one.)
How it works
Everything runs entirely locally — no login, no financial data uploaded anywhere. A small bookmarklet (included) reads the Kickstarter backings page into JSON. We paste the JSON into the notebook, pick a home currency, and it shows us:
- A live, reactive table grouped by deadline month
- Per-pledge currency conversion into whatever home currency we chose
- A foreign-transaction-fee adjustment, tweakable in real time (3% by default)
- Per-month totals and a grand total across everything active
- Checkboxes to toggle individual pledges on and off, so we can play out different combinations while we're deciding what to back next
The notebook lives here on Codeberg →
Why a Livebook, not an app?
I picked a notebook over the alternatives because each alternative demanded something. A web app wants a server, users, eventually a privacy policy. A CLI wants someone to know it exists. Even a desktop app wants packaging and updates. A notebook just sits there as a .livemd file. You open it, you run it, you fork it if you want to tweak the defaults. There's nothing for me to maintain on anyone else's behalf.
And it keeps me honest about scope. An app would slowly grow features. A notebook is what it is: this is what it does, this is the code that does it, that's all. No v2.
Most Livebook content I run across is data analysis or ML demos, which makes sense — it's what Livebook was built for. But it works just as well as a way to ship small personal tools. The notebook is the documentation; someone who wants to use the thing reads how it works in the same place they run it. I think more people should try this shape for the everyday stuff the big apps don't bother with.
Try it
If you also back Kickstarter campaigns, give it a spin. I'm on Mastodon — happy to chat or hear about edge cases the notebook doesn't yet handle. There's also an RSS feed if you'd like to know when more posts go up.