Case study: Keeping track of your expenses with Moneyzi and LavinMQ

Managing personal finances shouldn’t feel like a chore. That’s the philosophy behind Moneyzi, a personal finance application created by engineer Marco Antonio, based in Brazil. By automating how users import and categorize their credit card statements, Moneyzi turns a tedious task into a seamless experience.

Big tasks, small budget

As a solo developer at an early stage, Marco was looking for a solution that was cost-effective yet robust enough for a Proof of Concept. His primary concern was the app slowing down or timing out when processing large volumes of data simultaneously.

A message broker offers the perfect fix for these bottlenecks by offloading heavy tasks to a background queue, ensuring the user interface stays snappy. While self-hosting a broker could work, it would mean more time on server maintenance and less on building features. Instead, Marco needed a cost-effective hosted solution. Enter LavinMQ on CloudAMQP—the perfect balance of performance and ease.

LavinMQ handles the heavy lifting

The Moneyzi backend is built with a modern stack of Node.js and TypeScript, utilizing PostgreSQL as the primary database and Redis for caching. After deploying the backend on Railway, Marco connected the application to CloudAMQP to use its managed LavinMQ service for messaging. LavinMQ now plays a central role in the architecture, handling all asynchronous workloads, including statement imports, transaction processing, and AI-based expense categorization. This setup keeps the API responsive for users while more computationally intensive processing runs in the background.

The AI engine analyzes transactions to detect and categorize expenses.

categorias Get a clear view of your finances. No more wondering where your money goes.

By choosing a managed service, Marco solved his biggest headaches: stalling imports and worrying about server updates, patching, or broker maintenance. Implementing LavinMQ was straightforward. Marco only needed to change a single line of code (his connection string) to get everything operational.

“The implementation was very smooth... It’s been a great fit for this project, especially the managed setup and free tier. Thanks for the great service!” — Marco Antonio

Ready for the future

By choosing a managed broker from the start, Moneyzi gained a professional foundation at no cost. The biggest wins for the project were:

Solid stability: The app remains stable even when processing large data volumes.
More time to build: With no servers to manage, Marco can focus on improving his application.
Room to grow: The architecture was designed for scalability from the start, enabling future growth without infrastructure changes.

Today, Moneyzi is clear proof that you don’t need a large budget to build a high-quality, scalable application.

Ready to scale your own idea?

If you’re in the early stages like Moneyzi, check out the CloudAMQP Startup Program. Get the infrastructure you need to move from proof of concept to production with ease. https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/cloudamqp-startup-program.html