TLDR Money is an expense tracker and personal finance app for India. You add what you spend and it sorts into categories built for India; automatic Gmail tracking, whole-net-worth valuation and your FIRE date are in development.
There are no ads in it, and it will be funded by subscription alone when the paid plans arrive — no referrals, and no fund you never asked to buy.
When the tracking is free, the revenue comes from somewhere else — and that somewhere else is usually a product being sold back to you. We took the other path.
All legitimate. But each one gives the app a reason to sell you something.
Your subscription. That's the whole business model.
The subscription is the alignment. We only do well if the product is worth paying for — not if we can point you toward something else.
Once automatic tracking ships, it will work from day one — including the three months before you signed up.
TLDR will read your Gmail UPI and salary alerts and file each one automatically, backfilling three months of history when you connect. That is in development, and is not part of the first version. More on how automatic expense tracking works in India.
Mutual funds, stocks, gold, real estate and FDs roll up into a single net-worth figure with one honest trend line. More on tracking net worth in India.
Your FI number, how far along you are, and a projected retirement date — modelled for Lean, Coast and Fat FIRE. More on calculating your FIRE number in India.
Three screens, exactly as they ship. No dashboard to assemble first, and no template to fill in.
Activity
One timeline for the month — what came in, what went out, and the category it landed in. Grouped by day and totalled as you scroll, so a heavy week is obvious without you counting anything.
Add expense
In version one everything gets typed in: amount, category, done — the chai, the auto and the card spend alike. Mail alerts for cards and UPI, and voice entry that drops the amount, the merchant and the date into the right fields on their own, are both in development.
Categories
Fourteen categories to start with, each matching on the merchant names you already see on a statement. Rename them, add your own, and everything after that files itself the same way.
Your mailbox is read, stripped and redacted on your own device. What we store is the result — amount, merchant, date — in India, and deletable by you. The architecture is the privacy policy.
Your mailbox will be parsed on your phone. Headers, signatures and identifying details will be stripped there — only a short redacted snippet will ever be sent on.
When mail parsing ships it will categorise spend and detect salary credits from transaction alerts. TLDR can never move money, place trades, or open accounts on your behalf.
No third-party data brokers, no ad networks, no anonymised-and-resold loophole. Export or delete everything whenever you want.
Built to India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and your transaction data is processed and stored in India. Access, correct and erase it — and withdraw consent any time.
They're free because they make money elsewhere — brokerage commissions, loan referrals, distribution fees on the funds they sell you. That means their incentive is to sell you something. TLDR Money has one revenue line: your subscription. We don't have a lending arm, we don't sell insurance, we don't get paid when you buy a mutual fund. That leaves one way for us to earn: build something you keep paying for. We've written the comparisons out one by one — against spreadsheets, Mint, Walnut and broker apps.
Version one asks for no account access at all. The planned automatic version would use read-only access to the transaction alerts in your Gmail — UPI debits, card spends, salary credits — plus the asset values you add for net worth. The mail would be parsed and redacted on your own device, so no raw email would reach our servers; what we would store is the parsed record — amount, merchant, date — encrypted, in India. We never move money, place trades, sell it, or share it.
Nothing to cancel today, because nothing is charged yet. Once paid plans arrive you will cancel in one tap from inside the app, keep full access until the end of the period you already paid for, and be able to export all your data on the way out.
That has not been decided, because no paid plan exists yet. What is settled is that nothing is charged today, and you would only ever pay by actively choosing a plan.
Funded by subscription when it arrives — no ads, no referrals, no commissions. Nothing is charged today.