Finly is a free Walnut alternative that never asks for SMS permission. It does not read your messages or your bank, and it makes entry fast by letting you speak the expense instead of typing it. It also keeps a khata for money lent and borrowed.
Walnut's trick was reading the SMS alerts your bank already sent you. Every card swipe produced a message, Walnut parsed it, and your expenses filled themselves in without any bank login and without you typing anything. For the Indian and wider South Asian market that was a genuinely clever fit, because bank SMS alerts were universal there long before account aggregation was.
The app has since been absorbed into a larger financial platform and is no longer maintained as the standalone expense tracker people remember, which is why you are probably here. Finly fills the same gap from the other direction.
What you genuinely lose
Automatic is automatic, and Finly is not. Walnut required nothing from you after setup. Finly requires you to record the expense. That is a real downgrade in effort and there is no way to dress it up.
The failure mode is specific: manual tracking dies when you get busy. If you tried a manual tracker before and abandoned it in week three, be honest that the same thing may happen again.
What reduces the risk is that voice entry takes about three seconds, which is a different proposition from filling a form. But it is still an action you have to take, and Walnut's was not.
The permission that made it work, and why it went away
Reading your SMS means reading all of it. Bank alerts arrive in the same inbox as one-time passcodes, personal messages and everything else, and an app with that permission has access to the lot regardless of what it chooses to look at.
That is why the model has been squeezed from two directions at once. Mobile platforms progressively restricted SMS-reading permissions for exactly this reason, and banks moved alerts to their own apps. The category did not lose to a better competitor so much as to the permission drying up.
Worth knowing when you evaluate whatever you pick next: an app promising the same automatic magic today is either asking for that same broad access, or asking for your bank credentials through an aggregator, which is the trade covered on the no bank login page.
Side by side
| Walnut | Finly | |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Discontinued | Live, in any browser |
| Price | Was free | Free |
| How entries arrived | From bank SMS | Speak or type |
| Permissions | Full SMS access | Mic, on use |
| Bank login | No | Never |
| Cash spending | Invisible | Normal |
| Money lent | Split features | Khata, per person |
| Investments | No | Stocks, crypto, gold |
| Works offline | Partly | Fully |
Why this might suit you better than you expect
- Cash was always invisible to Walnut. No SMS is sent for a cash purchase, so the automatic ledger was never complete. If a real share of your spending is cash, you were already doing manual entry for the part that mattered most.
- Voice entry is close to free effort. Say the amount and what it was for. It is not zero like SMS parsing, but it is far below typing into a form.
- Nothing reads your inbox. No broad permission that also covers your passcodes and private messages.
- The lending ledger is separate. Money lent to a friend is a balance owed, not an expense, and Finly keeps the two apart properly.
- It runs anywhere. Browser-based, installs to the home screen, works on Android and iOS without an app store.
Starting again after an automatic app
The hardest part of moving from an automatic tracker to a manual one is not the app. It is that you never built the habit, because you never needed one.
What works: record at the moment of paying, not later. Standing at the counter, say the amount into your phone. The whole thing takes about as long as putting your card away. Batching it up for the evening is how people fail, because by the evening you have forgotten two of the six.
Give it two weeks before judging it. The first few days feel like extra work and then it stops registering as an action at all.
The honest part about free
Finly is free with no paid tier and no ads, built and self-hosted by one person. There is no support desk and no service commitment.
Given that you are here because an app you relied on disappeared, that is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. What limits the damage is that your records are written to your own device first and CSV export works today, so a shutdown would leave you with your data rather than without it.
Common questions
Is the Walnut expense tracker still available?
Not as the standalone app it used to be. It was folded into a larger financial platform, and the independent expense-tracking product people remember is no longer maintained under that name.
Does Finly read my SMS to log expenses automatically?
No. It never reads your messages, your notifications or your bank. Entry is by voice or typing, which is slower than SMS parsing and is the honest trade for not holding that permission.
What is the closest thing to automatic entry in Finly?
Voice. Speaking "twelve hundred groceries" fills in the amount, category, date and payment method for you, in nine languages including Urdu and Hindi. It takes about three seconds.
Does Finly track cash spending?
Yes, and this is where it is genuinely better than an SMS-based app. No bank message is generated for a cash purchase, so cash was always missing from Walnut's automatic ledger. In Finly, cash is ordinary.
Can I split expenses with friends like Walnut did?
Not as a group-splitting feature. Finly has a khata that tracks a running balance per person for money lent and borrowed, which covers the "he owes me" case but is not the same as a shared trip split.
Is Finly free?
Yes, with no paid tier, no trial and no ads.