SpendChat
Track your money like a conversation
Open-source expense and income tracker with a chat-style interface — log a transaction as fast as sending a message. Free for personal use, on web and mobile.
About SpendChat
SpendChat reimagines personal finance tracking as a conversation: type an amount, pick a category, hit send — done. No enterprise accounting complexity, no clutter. It ships with bulk spreadsheet import with preview, powerful filtering by date, type and category, note search, CSV export and print-to-PDF.
SpendChat is fully open source under AGPL-3.0 — Playxoft builds and maintains it in the open as an active open-source contribution. It is free for personal use with unlimited transactions, works beautifully across mobile, tablet and desktop, and supports light and dark themes.
Project Details
- Category
- Personal Finance
- Stack
- Next.js / TypeScript
- License
- AGPL-3.0 (open source)
- Platform
- Web + Mobile
- Pricing
- Free for personal use
- Status
- Live
What SpendChat does best
Chat-Style Logging
Log expenses and income like sending a message — amount, category, send.
Bulk Import
Import historical transactions from spreadsheets with a full preview before commit.
Powerful Filters
Slice by date range, type and category; search inside transaction notes.
Export Anywhere
CSV export and print-to-PDF for reports and tax season.
Private by Design
Account-based data security — your transactions stay yours.
Every Screen Size
Responsive across mobile, tablet and desktop with light and dark themes.
Overview
SpendChat is a personal expense and income tracker built around a chat interface: type an amount, pick a category, send. That design choice is the entire product thesis. Personal finance tools do not usually fail because they lack features — they fail because logging a coffee takes forty seconds and a form with six fields, so after two weeks nobody logs anything and the data becomes worthless.
Making entry fast is only half of it. SpendChat also imports historical transactions in bulk from a spreadsheet with a full preview before anything is committed, so starting is not gated on months of back-entry. Filtering slices by date range, type and category, search runs inside transaction notes, and anything on screen can leave as CSV or print to PDF when tax season arrives.
The project is fully open source under AGPL-3.0 and Playxoft develops it in the open as an ongoing contribution rather than as a loss-leader for a paid tier. It is free for personal use with unlimited transactions, responsive across phone, tablet and desktop, and ships light and dark themes. Anyone who would rather run it themselves can read the source, audit the data handling and host it.
How It Works
Log in the chat window
A transaction is an amount, a category and an optional note, entered the way you would send a message. The interaction is deliberately shorter than a form because the thing that determines whether a tracker works is whether you still use it in week three, not how much it can record in week one.
Bring your history in
Existing records import from a spreadsheet in bulk, with a preview showing exactly what will be created before anything commits. Starting with your real history rather than an empty ledger is what makes the first month of charts meaningful instead of misleading.
Filter and search
Slice by date range, type and category to answer a specific question, and search inside notes when the category is not enough to find what you remember. This is where the note field earns its place — the detail you write at entry time is what makes a transaction findable a year later.
Export when you need to
CSV export covers handing data to an accountant or pulling it into a spreadsheet for analysis the app does not do, and print-to-PDF covers the cases where someone wants a document. Neither is gated, because a tracker that holds your data hostage is not one worth adopting.
Common Use Cases
Everyday personal budgeting
Day-to-day expense and income tracking where the deciding factor is entry speed, and where unlimited free transactions mean the tool does not start nagging once you actually use it consistently.
Freelance and side income
Separating business from personal spending across the year, with category filters and CSV export doing the work when the tax return is due rather than a month of reconstruction.
Self-hosted and privacy-first use
Anyone who would rather their financial history not sit on a third party's servers. The AGPL-3.0 source can be audited and run on your own infrastructure with no feature reduction.
What to Decide Early
Set your categories deliberately, once
Categories are the axis every chart and filter is built on, and they are the thing people change repeatedly in the first month. A small, stable set you actually use beats a detailed taxonomy you abandon — and because recategorising historical transactions is tedious, a few minutes of thought before the first bulk import saves considerably more later.
Decide whether notes are part of your habit
The note field is optional and the app works fine without it, but it is the difference between a year-old entry that means something and one that reads as an unexplained amount. If you intend to use the export for tax or reimbursement, treat notes as required from the start rather than trying to reconstruct context afterwards.
Choose hosted or self-hosted up front
Both are free for personal use, so the decision is about data custody rather than price. Self-hosting means the financial history never leaves infrastructure you control, at the cost of you owning backups and updates. Moving between the two is possible via export and import, but starting where you intend to stay avoids a gap in the record.
Frequently Asked Questions
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