Pleo

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You cannot build Pleo, and it is worth being precise about why.

**Issuing payment cards requires a licence, a sponsor bank or a card issuing platform, network membership, anti-money-laundering obligations, and capital.** That is not a build, it is a regulated business. Nothing an AI agent writes changes that.

What you can build is everything around the cards, which is where the daily annoyance actually is.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- Tesseract for receipts
- Caddy in front

WHAT TO BUILD
- transactions: id, source, external_id, card_last4, person_id, merchant, amount_cents, currency, spent_at, imported_at — imported from your existing bank or card provider's export or feed, never invented
- receipts: id, transaction_id, path, sha256, ocr_json, uploaded_at
- policies: category rules, per-person monthly caps, and a receipt-required threshold
- flags: id, transaction_id, rule, note, resolved_by, at

THE PART THAT IS ACTUALLY USEFUL
- **Chasing receipts.** Import transactions daily, match them to uploaded receipts by amount and date, and message the person once about the ones still missing — with a link that takes two taps to resolve on a phone
- One message a day at most, listing everything outstanding. A message per transaction is why people turn notifications off
- A monthly view per person and per category, so 'why did software cost double' is one click
- Export in the exact format your accountant's system wants, with the receipt images attached

MATCHING, WHICH IS THE ONLY HARD BIT
- Match on amount plus a date window plus a fuzzy merchant name. Card descriptors are ugly — 'SQ *COFFEE 1234' — so normalise aggressively and learn a mapping per descriptor once a human confirms it
- Never auto-match two candidates; ask. **A receipt attached to the wrong transaction is worse than a missing one** because nobody will ever notice

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD OF ISSUING CARDS
- Use virtual cards from your existing bank or a card provider, one per subscription or per person, and import the feed
- Enforce limits with the provider's own controls; approximating them in your own software after the fact does not stop a payment

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Be honest that the cards are not buildable, and build the receipt chase. That is the part everybody actually hates, and it needs no licence.