What you have spent, read from your own mailbox

Budget Tracker is an Android app that reads the transaction alerts your bank already emails you, and turns them into a weekly picture of your spending. It runs on your phone. There is no account to create.

How it works

Most banks will email you when a card is used. Budget Tracker asks Google for mail from those senders only, reads the amount, the shop and the last digits of the card out of each alert, and then discards the message. What it keeps is a list of amounts and dates — no inbox, no message bodies, nothing that was not needed to total up a week.

All of that happens on the handset. Your mail is never sent anywhere to be interpreted, because there is nowhere to send it: the privacy policy explains exactly what is kept and what is not.

Bank lists

Banks reword their alert emails, and new banks get added. Rather than waiting for an app update each time, the app can fetch a bank list — a small public file describing how to read each bank's alerts.

• It is off by default, and the app asks before fetching anything.
• It contains nothing about you. It is the same file for everyone, and fetching it sends a version number and nothing else.
• It is signed. A list that does not carry a valid signature is refused, so a tampered or substituted file cannot change what the app reads.
• New banks always arrive switched off. The app never starts reading a new sender without being asked.

See the current bank list and its signature →

What it is not

It is not a budgeting service, not connected to your bank, and not a statement. It can only see what your bank happens to email you, which is less than everything. That limitation is worth reading before you rely on it.