Questions worth asking

A personal finance app for India. Version one sorts what you type into categories built for India. Three things are in development: tracking every rupee you spend automatically, rolling everything you own into a single net worth figure, and projecting the date you could stop working. The automatic version will read the transaction alerts already in your Gmail rather than asking you to type anything in. It will be funded by subscription alone — no ads, no referrals, no commissions on any financial product.

Your bank and card issuer already email you when money moves — UPI debits, card spends, salary credits. TLDR Money will read those alerts with read-only access once that ships and files each transaction into a category automatically. Connecting your account will backfill three months of history immediately, so the first screen shows a real spending pattern instead of an empty state.

In version one, yes: you add what you spend and it sorts it into categories built for India. Automatic tracking is in development, because manual entry is why most expense tracking fails — a spreadsheet works for about nine days and then stops being a record of anything. Because the alerts already arrive in your mailbox, something just has to read them, and that something will be the app. You may still occasionally correct a category, and cash spending will always have to be added by hand if you want it counted, because nothing generates an alert for a banknote.

Cash, first of all — no automatic method of any kind can see a banknote change hands. Beyond that, coverage depends on your bank actually emailing you: most major Indian banks and issuers do, but not for every alert type, and some accounts need email alerts switched on in netbanking first. Alerts are also not statements. An alert records that a transaction happened; it is not a reconciled bank record, so you should still check the figures that matter to you.

Not yet — there is no iPhone build today. The automatic version is designed to work identically on iPhone and Android, because it will read your mailbox, not your phone's SMS inbox. Full answer on expense trackers for iPhone in India.

Because Android cannot scope it to your bank. The SMS permission grants an app your entire message inbox, including every one-time password you receive and every personal message. Google treats it as highly sensitive and restricts which apps may request it at all. Reading email alerts gets the same transaction data without ever being in a position to see an OTP, so there is no reason to ask for the broader permission. More on tracking without SMS permission.

No, and we never will — reading a transaction alert requires no banking credentials at all. Full answer on expense tracking in India.

No, and this is a structural limit rather than a policy. Access is read-only, and transfers, trades and account opening are not operations that exist within a mail scope — there is no setting we could change to enable them. Combined with never holding your credentials, there is no route to your accounts even in principle.

Your mail will never be stored on our servers. The alerts will be found, stripped and redacted on your own device, and only a short redacted snippet will be sent on to be read. What we will store is the result of that — amount, merchant, date, category — encrypted, on infrastructure in India, so your history is there when you open the app. You can export those records or delete them with your account. The architecture is described on the security page.

Two independent ways, including one that never depends on our app working. Full answer on security.

No. No ad networks, no third-party data brokers, no anonymised-and-resold arrangement. This is easier for us to hold to than for much of the category, for a structural reason rather than a virtuous one: our only revenue is the subscription, so there is no advertising business or distribution arm whose economics depend on knowing what you spend.

Nothing today — no paid plan is charged yet, and no rate is set. The reasoning for charging directly rather than taking commissions is on how we make money.

Nothing is charged today, so there is nothing to trial and nothing to cancel. You would only ever be charged by actively choosing a plan.

Because a free finance app still has costs, and that money then comes from somewhere other than you: brokerage on trades, distribution fees on funds it recommends, interest on a pre-approved loan, or a referral fee on a credit card. All legal, all normal — and each one gives the product a reason to show you something, and no reason to tell you when the honest answer is to do nothing. One subscription is the whole business model, so the only way it works is if the product is worth paying for.

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.

Those are investment platforms, free because they earn elsewhere. TLDR Money is not a broker or a distributor and earns nothing when you buy or hold any product. Full comparison on the homepage.

Everything you own at current value, minus everything you owe. Mutual funds, stocks, fixed deposits, EPF and PPF, gold and property on one side; outstanding loan principal, credit card and BNPL balances on the other. Two rules make it honest: value the asset at what it is worth now rather than what you paid, and be conservative wherever you are estimating — particularly on property, where an optimistic figure silently inflates every decision downstream. More on net worth tracking.

Include it in net worth, with the loan recorded against it, but keep it out of a retirement corpus you plan to draw income from. A home you live in is genuine net worth and cannot be spent — selling it means needing somewhere else to live. Counting it toward a FIRE number is the most common reason people conclude they are far closer to independence than they are.

Your target corpus is your annual expenses divided by the withdrawal rate you rely on — 25 times expenses at 4%, about 28.6 times at 3.5%, roughly 33.3 times at 3% — inflated to the year you plan to stop. Your projection is your current corpus compounding, plus what you add each month compounding on top. Both are illustrations built on stated assumptions, not forecasts, and changing the withdrawal rate or the inflation assumption moves the answer substantially. The arithmetic is worked through on the FIRE page.

It was derived from US market history, and a longer retirement with no state healthcare backstop argues for treating 4% as a ceiling, not a constant. Full reasoning on the FIRE calculator.

No. TLDR Money is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser, research analyst, stock broker or mutual fund distributor, and is not an NBFC, bank or insurance intermediary. It is an information and record-keeping tool. It does not recommend securities and does not tell you what to buy, sell or hold. Every figure it shows is a calculation on data you supply and assumptions it states.

TLDR Money is operated by Sonal Systems Private Limited, incorporated on 28 June 2026 and registered in Vadodara, Gujarat, with CIN U62099GJ2026PTC179785. The company does no lending, no insurance distribution and takes no mutual fund commissions — its only revenue line is the subscription. More on the about page.

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