An expense tracker that never asks for a bank login
Most budgeting apps start by asking for your online banking password. Here is what you give up by refusing, what you get back, and how entry stays fast when nothing fills itself in.
Almost every budgeting app opens the same way. Pick your bank, type your online banking username and password, and wait while it pulls in the last ninety days.
That step is the product for most of them. It is also the step a lot of people cannot take, or will not.
This is a straight account of what happens when an app refuses to ask for it at all, which is how we built ours. It includes the parts where the trade goes against you.
Who cannot connectLink to this section
Your country is not covered. These feeds are built on a handful of aggregators, and their maps are smaller than the marketing suggests. Plaid's own page advertises "over 95% bank coverage and localized support across 20 countries", under the page title "North America, UK, and Europe". YNAB publishes direct import for banks in the US, Canada, the UK and the EU. If you bank outside those maps, "connect your bank" is not a feature you are choosing against. It will not find your bank. What to do when your country is not on the list covers that case on its own.
Your bank is not covered, even though your country is. Smaller banks, credit unions and newer digital banks drop off these lists regularly.
Your bank's terms discourage it. Sharing your online banking login with a third party is not something every bank is happy about. Check yours before you decide.
You hold money in more than one country. Even where each bank is supported, one app rarely connects to all of them at once, and the currency handling underneath is usually an afterthought.
Who will not connectLink to this section
You do not want to hand over a banking password. Reasonable. Aggregators hold credentials or long-lived tokens for millions of people, which makes them worth attacking.
You do not want the data resold. If an app is free and connected to your bank, its terms are worth reading closely: for some, spending data is part of how the product pays for itself.
You have been through it. Feeds break. A bank changes a login flow, the connection drops, and the app quietly shows stale balances until you notice.
What you give up. This part is real.Link to this section
If nothing logs into your bank, nothing fills the ledger in for you.
You type it, photograph it, forward it or import it. That is the cost, and no amount of good design removes it.
So if what you want is to open an app on Sunday and see the week already categorised with no effort from you, a bank-sync app is the right answer and you should go and get one. We say the same thing on our Mint page, and the honest list is there.
What you get backLink to this section
It works the same everywhere. There is no coverage map, because there is nothing to cover. A bank in Jakarta and a bank in Dublin are the same amount of work: you tell the app what happened.
Nothing to breach. There is no credential store, because there are no credentials. There is no aggregator in the middle holding a token for your account.
Nothing to break. A feed cannot silently stop when there is no feed. What is in the ledger is what you put there.
Everything is deliberate. This one surprises people. Typing an amount, even for ten seconds, is the moment you notice what you spent. A feed that fills itself in is easy to stop reading.
Making entry fast is the whole jobLink to this section
An app with no bank feed lives or dies on how quickly you can get a line in. Five ways, in Hundo:
Type the amount first. Enter the number and the app offers the merchants and categories you have used for that amount before, ranked from your own history. One tap fills the rest.
Photograph the receipt. The assistant reads it and drafts the entry for you to confirm.
Forward the email receipt. Every account gets its own address at receipts.hundo.finance. Forward the confirmation from a shop or an airline and it arrives as a draft.
Import a file. CSV, TSV or Excel, with column mapping and duplicate detection, so a monthly statement download takes one pass.
Ask the assistant. Type "spent 45 on groceries yesterday" and confirm the draft. Nothing is recorded until you do.
Typing and file import are part of the free tracker. Photographs, forwarded email and the assistant are part of Pro, because each one costs us a model call.
The import matters more than it looks. Your bank will let you download a statement even when no app can connect to it, so an import plus a few typed lines gets you a complete month in minutes.
The honest summaryLink to this section
A tracker with no bank login is worse at the thing bank sync is for, and better at everything that depends on not having one.
If your bank is supported, you trust the aggregator and you want the feed, use a sync app.
If you are outside the map, or you are not handing over the password, the choice was never between two kinds of app. It was between a tracker built for this and a spreadsheet.
We built the tracker for that case: free forever, nothing capped, in 166 currencies, with an AI layer you can point at your own numbers if you want it.