Most "private" finance apps store your transactions on their servers. Expensly stores them on your phone. That is the entire difference, and it changes everything.
Every popular expense tracker calls itself "private." Mint did. YNAB does. Copilot does. Monarch does. What they actually mean is that your transactions are stored on their servers under reasonable security practices. That is fine, but it is not private. Privacy means the data simply isn't somewhere it could be reached.
Expensly is built around a different model. Your expenses live in a local database on your iPhone. There is no Expensly server holding your data, because there is no Expensly server at all. We can't read your transactions, can't be subpoenaed for them, can't lose them in a breach, and can't sell them — because we don't have them.
This is the only kind of privacy that survives contact with reality. Policies change. Companies get acquired. Servers get breached. The only data that can't leak is data that was never collected.
A local SQLite database on your iPhone, encrypted at rest by iOS when you have a device passcode set.
No Expensly servers. No user accounts. No Plaid. No analytics SDK. No crash reporter that exfiltrates data. No ad networks.
Nothing. The app makes no network requests for your data. There is no inbox of your transactions waiting for us to read.
Nothing. The app is free, with no premium tier and no plans for one. We're not extracting value from you, because there's nothing to extract.
Everything. CSV export anytime. Delete the app and the data is gone. No "request data deletion" form, because we don't have your data.
Nothing about your past data. New owners can't sell what was never uploaded. Your existing copy of the app keeps working.
Local-only storage means manual entry. There's no bank sync because there's no server to receive synced transactions. For most people who actually want privacy, that's not a downgrade — it's the whole point. Manual entry takes a few seconds per expense and produces something automated tracking never quite delivers: real awareness of where your money goes.
You also won't get cross-device sync built in. If you want to use the app on a second phone or share with a partner, that's a friction. iCloud device backup will restore everything to a replacement iPhone, but live multi-device sync would require the cloud database we deliberately don't have. CSV export is your bridge.
We don't, from the app. Expensly is free and stays free. It's a small app from a tiny team — keeping it lean is the whole strategy.
Apple sees aggregate, anonymized usage stats (downloads, crashes) — the same as for every iOS app. Apple does not see your transactions because those never leave the app's local sandbox.
Yes. iOS encrypts app sandbox storage at rest when you have a device passcode set, which is the platform standard for sensitive data.
No. We have no servers and no copies of your data. There's nothing to subpoena.
Free. Offline. Local-only. The privacy promise that actually holds up.