What Finly is, and what it is not

What it is

Finly is a free personal finance app for tracking day-to-day money. You add an expense by speaking it in ordinary language, "spent 250 on groceries yesterday with card", and a parser running inside your browser pulls out the amount, category, date and payment method, filling the form before you look at it. You confirm, and it is saved.

It also does two things most expense trackers do not: it keeps a khata, a lend-and-borrow ledger with a running balance per person, and it tracks an investment portfolio across stocks, crypto, funds and gold.

It runs in a browser, installs as a PWA, and works offline. There is nothing to buy.

Who it is for

Finly is built for people whose money habits do not fit the apps designed around a US or European current account.

• People who lend and borrow informally. The khata is not a bolt-on. Keeping track of "I'll pay you back" between friends, family and shopkeepers is a normal part of managing money across South Asia and the Gulf, and almost no Western finance app models it at all.
• People who hold PSX stocks. Pakistan Stock Exchange coverage is rare in consumer portfolio trackers. Finly quotes PSX alongside crypto and international equities.
• People who would rather speak than type. Logging an expense should take three seconds standing at a counter, not a form with six fields.
• People who do not want their bank connected to anything. Finly has no bank integration, by choice. See below.

It supports 11 currencies including PKR, INR, AED and SAR, and 9 voice languages including Urdu, Hindi and Arabic.

How it is built

Two decisions shape everything else.

Local-first

Every entry is written to your device's own storage before anything touches the network, which is why the app works with no signal. The copy on your device is the real one; the server is a convenience for getting the same data onto your other devices. Receipt photos never leave the device at all.

Self-hosted, end to end

The application, the database, the sign-in system and the email sender all run on a single server we rent and operate in Frankfurt. There is no third-party authentication provider holding your identity, no managed database vendor holding your records, and no email platform holding your address.

That is unusual for a small product. The normal path is to assemble four SaaS vendors, and it is deliberate: fewer companies hold your data because fewer companies are involved. The trade-off is honest and worth stating: one server means no uptime guarantee, and the off-site backup is only as fresh as last night's. Both are described plainly rather than glossed.

What it deliberately is not

• Not a bank aggregator. No account linking, no Plaid, no statement import. Every record exists because someone entered it. This rules out a whole category of convenience, and it also rules out handing your banking credentials to a third party.
• Not an investment platform. You cannot trade through Finly. Holdings are recorded and priced so you can see where you stand, and prices come from third parties and can be delayed or wrong.
• Not financial advice. Finly does arithmetic on numbers you give it. It does not recommend, rate or advise, and nothing in it should be read as a suggestion about what to do with your money.
• Not ad-supported. There are no adverts and nothing is sold or used for ad targeting. Finly runs Google Analytics for aggregate page views and usage counts; see the privacy policy for exactly what that does and does not see.
• Not a subscription. It is free, and there is currently nothing to upgrade to.

Where it is up to

Facts

Contact

For questions, problems, or anything about your data, write to [email protected]. Data-specific questions are covered in the privacy policy, and the rules of use are in the terms.

The most useful message you can send is one about something that broke or something that is missing. Finly is built by one person and that feedback is what decides what gets done next.