Cuentio: AI Expense Tracker

Track spending by hand, receipt photo or voice. Plan with envelopes and share household expenses. No bank linking or ads. Now on iPhone and Android.

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Available on iPhone and Android

Cuentio is live on the App Store and Google Play. Track everyday spending by hand, with a receipt photo, or by voice—without connecting your bank.

Free to download, with optional Cuentio Pro subscriptions. Available in English and Spanish. No ads on either plan.

Inspiration

I wanted a simple answer to “where did my money go?” without handing an app my bank credentials or losing access to my records behind a paywall.

Before building Cuentio, I analyzed a corpus of 24,532 public store-review records across 25 expense apps: 20,629 for manual trackers and 3,903 for receipt/AI and bank-linked apps. The August 17 study covered US and Spanish storefronts, using bilingual keyword classification followed by close reading of selected positive and negative reviews. It was exploratory research, not a representative survey or 24,532 individual user interviews.

Recurring complaints became product decisions: avoid fragile bank connections, keep manual entry ad-free, state subscription limits clearly, and let people export their records without paying.

That led to three decisions: manual expense entry stays free, AI is optional, and exporting your data never requires a subscription. Cuentio is built by one independent developer in Spain, for people who prefer to stay in control of what they record and share.

What it does

Capture spending your way. Add an expense manually, photograph a receipt, or say or type something like “coffee with Ana, 3.50.” AI proposes the details; you review and correct them before saving. Bank CSV imports are parsed on the phone and reviewed before they become transactions.

Understand the month. See balances, spending by category, fixed versus variable expenses and comparisons over time. Pro adds deeper reports and an AI monthly summary; the first summary sample is free.

Plan with envelopes. Allocate money to categories, move it between envelopes and see what remains. The full envelope system is part of Pro, with a guided example available to everyone.

Share the household. A Pro subscriber can create a household and invite a partner. Members can record shared expenses and see who paid; joining a household is available on the free plan.

Keep ownership of your records. Export transactions as CSV, Excel or PDF, or make a JSON backup. Basic data export is free; adding receipt photos to a PDF is a Pro feature. Cuentio also supports recurring expenses, multiple currencies and home-screen widgets.

What changed for launch

  • A redesigned interface across onboarding, accounts, expense entry, history and settings, with clearer navigation and a prominent add button.
  • Envelope budgeting with a guided first experience.
  • Expanded reports and clearer household balances.
  • A local SQLite replica and durable changes queue, so manual work can continue offline and sync when connectivity returns. AI capture requires a connection.
  • Improvements to search, transaction details, duplicate handling and batch imports.
  • Public releases on both stores and a bilingual website with direct download links.

The video and gallery show the current interface with sample data. The 1:48 demo follows manual entry, AI review, reports, envelope budgeting, shared household spending and a completed export.

How I built it

The app uses React Native, Expo, TypeScript and Expo Router, with Reanimated, Zustand and TanStack Query. SQLite holds the local replica and pending changes.

Supabase provides authentication, Postgres and Row Level Security. Edge Functions handle server operations, while Cloudflare R2 stores receipt files. AI receipt and language processing use Gemini on Vertex AI, with an OpenAI fallback. Users review AI output before committing a transaction.

RevenueCat manages the monthly and annual subscriptions across iOS and Android. Offerings provide localized store prices, RevenueCat paywalls present the upgrade, and subscription events synchronize Pro access with the backend. The free plan remains usable after cancellation.

PostHog tracks activation, capture, paywall and subscription journeys. Automated checks cover types, translations, unit tests and synchronization behavior, with Maestro flows and visual checks on iOS and Android. Releases use fastlane.

Challenges and lessons

Financial data needs predictable behavior. Offline retries must not duplicate expenses or apply a balance change twice. The sync redesign introduced durable queued operations, server-side idempotency and explicit recovery states.

AI must earn trust. I removed an early line-item receipt breakdown because impressive output was not enough when individual details were unreliable. A reviewed transaction is more useful than an automatic mistake.

A sustainable free tier needs boundaries. Manual entry and data export remain free. AI usage is metered, and Pro funds the features with ongoing service costs. Limits are shown in the app rather than described as “unlimited.”

Localization is product work. English and Spanish need natural copy, correct number formatting and understandable authentication emails—not just translated buttons.

What I am proud of

Shipping a working app on both stores as a solo developer; preserving a useful free path; making the paid benefits explicit; and taking the less visible work—offline behavior, data export and recovery—as seriously as the interface.

What's next

Use real launch feedback to improve activation and reliability, measure the subscription funnel, and refine the capture and budgeting flows. Merchant rules and short, practical lessons about everyday spending are areas I want to explore next.

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