Finly is a free expense tracker with no bank integration of any kind. It cannot connect to your bank, because that feature does not exist in it. There is no Plaid, Yodlee, Salt Edge or TrueLayer connection, no request for online banking credentials, and no read access to your transaction history.
You record what you spend, by typing it or by speaking it. Records are written to your own device first and work offline. If you sign in, they sync to a server run directly by the developer, not to a third-party cloud.
Why most budget apps want you to link your bank
Automatic import is a genuinely good feature, and it is why apps ask. But it is worth being clear about what actually happens when you agree.
Your bank credentials, or an access token standing in for them, go to an aggregator: a third company sitting between the app and your bank. That aggregator pulls your transaction history, often the full history rather than the last month, and typically keeps pulling on a schedule for as long as the connection is live. The app you signed up for is one customer of that aggregator. The aggregator is the party actually holding your financial data.
That means at least three organisations hold a copy of your spending: your bank, the aggregator, and the app. Each is a separate company with its own security posture, its own retention policy, its own change of ownership risk, and its own breach history.
For many people that trade is fine. Automatic import saves real effort. But it should be a choice, and a lot of apps do not offer the other option at all: no connection means no app.
What manual entry actually costs
The honest answer is: about ten seconds per expense, and remembering to do it.
Finly is built to make the first part small. Voice entry means you can say "spent 250 on groceries yesterday with card" and confirm what it filled in, rather than tapping through four fields. Recurring entries mean rent, salary and subscriptions are entered once and appear on their own after that, which removes the majority of repeated typing for most people.
The second part, remembering, is real and no app fully solves it. What manual entry gives you in exchange is that you notice what you spend while you spend it. People who track by hand routinely report spending less, and the mechanism is not mysterious: an automatic feed is a report you read afterwards, and a manual entry is a decision you make at the time.
What you get instead
- No third party in the middle. No aggregator holds your statements, because none is connected.
- Cash works. A bank feed cannot see cash. If a meaningful share of your spending is cash, an automatic tracker is quietly incomplete, and the gap is invisible.
- Money between people works. The khata ledger tracks what you lend and borrow, which no bank feed can categorise correctly.
- Nothing breaks when a bank changes its login. Aggregator connections drop constantly. Yours cannot, because there is not one.
- It works in countries aggregators do not cover. Bank connection coverage is thin outside North America and Western Europe.
- It works offline. See offline expense tracking.
What Finly stores, precisely
| Data | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Expenses and income | Your device, and your own account if signed in |
| Budgets, khata, investments | Your device, and your own account if signed in |
| Receipt photos | Your device only, never uploaded |
| Bank credentials | Never requested, never stored, no such field exists |
| Card numbers | Never requested. "Card" is a label on an entry, not a card on file |
| Analytics and trackers | Google Analytics (page views only). No pixels, no ad SDKs, no session recording |
The full detail, including the one place data genuinely does reach another company, is in the privacy policy. It is written to be read rather than to satisfy a lawyer.
Who this is not for
If you have a high volume of card transactions and you want them categorised without touching them, manual entry will annoy you and an automatic tracker is the better tool. Finly will not quietly become one later, because not having that connection is the design, not a missing feature.
Finly suits you if you deal in cash, lend money to people, want no third party holding your statements, or simply want to notice your spending as it happens.
Eight budget apps that never ask you to link a bank account
Finly is one of these and we have tried to be straight about the rest. Every one works by manual entry, so none of them can see your statements. They differ in method, in what the free tier holds back, and in which platforms they run on.
1. Monefy — fastest entry
Built around a circular category picker, so logging a purchase takes about two taps. That speed is the whole product, and it is genuinely the quickest of the eight. Recurring payments, multi-currency and cloud sync sit behind a one-time Pro unlock. How Finly compares to Monefy.
2. Goodbudget — best if you want a method
Envelope budgeting: you divide income into envelopes before spending rather than categorising after. The free tier caps how many envelopes and devices you get. If your problem is not "where did it go" but "I overspend", a method beats a ledger. How Finly compares to Goodbudget.
3. Bluecoins — most powerful reporting
Android-first, with the deepest reports and charts on this list — budgets, forecasting, account reconciliation, proper double-entry if you want it. A paid unlock removes limits. It is the closest thing here to desktop accounting software, with the learning curve that implies.
4. Spendee — best-looking
Clean design and shared wallets for splitting household spending. It does offer bank connections, but you are not obliged to use them and manual mode works fully. Free tier is limited on wallets and budgets.
5. DailyBean — best for people who quit tracking
Deliberately tiny: a few taps a day, mood tracking alongside spending, no reports to speak of. If every full-featured tracker you have tried lasted a fortnight, the answer might be one that asks less of you.
6. Khatabook — best for a shop ledger
Built for shopkeepers recording customer credit rather than for personal budgeting: a business ledger with reminders and balances per customer. If you are recording udhar for a shop rather than tracking your own spending, it is the right tool and Finly is not. Where the two differ.
7. A spreadsheet — still the honest default
Free, infinitely flexible, no privacy question at all, and it will outlive every app on this list. It loses on friction: nobody opens a spreadsheet at a till. Worth naming because for a lot of people it is genuinely enough.
8. Finly — best for voice entry and a khata ledger
Ours. You say “spent 250 on groceries yesterday with card” and a parser running in your browser pulls out the amount, category, date and payment method for you to confirm — which removes most of the friction that kills manual tracking. It also keeps a separate khata ledger for money lent and borrowed, and an investment tracker covering PSX, Yahoo Finance and CoinGecko. Free, no account needed to look around, and it works with no connection.
Where it loses: no envelope method, reports are lighter than Bluecoins, and it is a web app rather than a store download.
Also worth a look
If you came here from a specific app, we have written up the trade-off against Mint, YNAB, Monarch Money, Rocket Money, Copilot Money and Walnut separately.
Common questions
Which budget apps do not require linking a bank account?
Finly, Monefy, Goodbudget, Bluecoins, Spendee, Fudget, 1Money and Money Manager all work without linking a bank account, and all of them are compared above. None uses an account aggregator such as Plaid, so none can read your transaction history. The trade-off in every case is the same: you enter what you spend yourself, which takes roughly ten seconds an expense.
Can Finly connect to my bank if I want it to?
No. There is no bank connection feature and none is planned. Every record in Finly exists because a person entered it.
Does Finly use Plaid?
No. Finly uses no account aggregator: not Plaid, Yodlee, MX, Salt Edge, TrueLayer or any other.
Do I have to give an email address?
Only if you want sync. You can read data without an account. Adding or editing requires one, and that means an email and a password. If you never sign in, nothing leaves your device.
Is it really free?
Yes. No paid tier, no trial period, no ads, and no data sold. Finly runs Google Analytics for aggregate usage, but that data is not for sale either.
How do I import my existing expenses?
There is no bulk import yet. There is CSV export, so your data can always leave. Import is a fair thing to ask for and it is not built.
What if I lose my phone?
If you are signed in, your records are on your account and appear again when you sign in elsewhere. If you never signed in, they were only ever on that device and cannot be recovered. Receipt photos are device-only either way.
Is manual tracking accurate?
It is as accurate as you are, which is a real limitation. An automatic feed is accurate about card spending and blind to cash. Neither is complete on its own.
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