No account. No bank connection. No monthly bill.

Your information is YOURS

An expense app asks you to create an account, then to log into your bank — inside the app, on a screen the app drew. Something in you says no.

That's not technophobia. When a small app offers to pull in your transactions, it isn't talking to your bank; it's talking to a financial data aggregator — Plaid, MX, Finicity, Yodlee — a middleman whose name isn't on the screen you're typing your password into.

Plaid paid $58 million to settle a class action alleging it used login screens made to look like real banks' in order to obtain customers' banking credentials. Final approval came in 2022; the class was estimated at 98 million people. Plaid denied the claims and settled citing litigation costs.

The point isn't that one company behaved badly. It's structural: linking an account means a third party you didn't choose holds a key to your financial history, and whether that stays acceptable depends on decisions made years from now at a company you have no relationship with.

Same for the server. Even with no bank link, most expense apps keep your ledger on their infrastructure — a timestamped record of where you were and who you paid. It can be breached, the policy can change, and the company can be sold with your data as an asset. None of that needs a villain. It only needs time.

The part that should annoy you

Why do these apps charge every month? Usually not greed — the vendor has a real recurring cost per user: servers to store your ledger, bandwidth to sync it, and a per-connection fee to the aggregator for your bank link.

Software that runs on your phone and stores data on your phone costs its developer nothing per month. No server bill, because no server. So it can be sold once — not out of generosity, but arithmetic.

The surveillance and the subscription are the same architectural decision. Refuse the first and the second stops making sense.

What Spndle does instead

Spndle is us, so weigh this accordingly — then go check it, because these are claims you can verify.

• No account. No sign-up, no email, no password. We don't know who you are; there's no mechanism by which we could.
• No bank connection. Not optional — not built. There's no aggregator in the app.
• No servers. Not "we don't look." We don't run infrastructure that could hold your data. It lives in a file on your phone.
• On-device receipt reading by default, and mileage distance computed locally from GPS.
• Free to use. $4.99 once, ever, to unlock PDF and CSV export. No subscription, nothing to cancel.

Every time Spndle touches the network

"Private" is easy to claim, so here's the complete list. Three features can reach the network, each off unless you turn it on — and none sends anything to us, because there's no us to send it to.

What you give up

This is a trade, and you should know the cost before you download.

• You type or scan things in. Scanning is quick, but nothing arrives by itself. If automatic import is what you want, you want a different app — and you'll pay monthly for it.
• No web app, no invisible sync. Both would need the server this page argues against.
• Lose the phone with no backup and the data is gone. Nobody has a copy to restore. Turn on iCloud backup or export a backup file regularly. Local-only means you are the backup strategy, but Spndle makes that easy.
• No quarterly estimates, invoicing, or bookkeeping. It's an expense log. More on that →

You are not locked in

Spndle writes out a backup of your whole database — every expense, payee, amount, category, note and trip — and that's free. It isn't behind the $4.99 unlock. Getting your data out costs nothing, ever. The paid unlock covers formatted PDF and CSV reports for your accountant; it is not the exit door.

And there's no proprietary format to be trapped by. The .spndle backup is simply a SQLite database — the same format your phone and browser already use for their own storage. Rename it to .db, open it in any SQLite browser on your desktop, and your data is right there in ordinary tables you can read, query and export yourself. No parser to write, no permission to ask, and nothing you need us for.

So if this app stopped being updated tomorrow, your records would still be on your phone, in an open format, in an app that doesn't need to phone home to work. That's the practical meaning of buying software instead of renting it.

One caveat worth knowing: the backup holds your records, not the receipt photographs themselves — those are image files that live separately on the phone. If you want the pictures kept too, turn on Save Receipt Photos in Settings and they'll go to your camera roll, where your normal photo backup picks them up.

Questions

Can you see my expenses?

No — and not as a policy choice. There's no server for the data to arrive at. The only way we'd see one is if you sent us a screenshot.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Logging, on-device scanning, categorizing and mileage all work with no connection. Only the optional features above need one.

Why $4.99 instead of free?

Because the alternatives to charging are advertising or selling data, both of which need exactly the infrastructure this page argues against. One small payment is the version that compromises nothing.

Will it become a subscription later?

There'd be nothing to bill for — a subscription funds recurring costs, and an app with no servers doesn't generate any. Purchases already made are already made.

The above summarizes the Privacy Policy, which governs. Plaid, MX, Finicity and Yodlee are trademarks of their respective owners, referenced descriptively; Spndle is not affiliated with any of them. Statements about the Plaid litigation reflect publicly reported settlement terms, in which the allegations were denied.