I have quit more expense trackers than I can count.
The pattern was always the same. A good first week: every coffee logged, categories tidy, a pleasant sense of being in control. Then a busy week. I'd fall four days behind, the backlog would turn into a chore, and catching up felt worse than starting over. So I'd stop. A month later I'd find a new app and do it all again.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the problem was never motivation. These apps ask for two things: that you enter every expense, and that you keep doing it forever. The first is tedious. The second is unrealistic. Most of the information was already sitting in my inbox anyway.
So I built Pursly, the first app from my small studio, Habre. It's the expense tracker I wanted: one that keeps up even when I don't.
Almost everything you buy online, and a lot of what you buy in person, sends a receipt to your email within seconds. Typing that into an app is just copying.
Connect your Gmail once, and Pursly reads those receipts for you. The merchant, the amount and the date become an expense moments after the email arrives. It files each one in the category you'd have used yourself. And if you're starting fresh, it can bring in the last three months of receipts in one go, so you don't begin with an empty month.
Two promises matter more to me than the feature itself:
"How much did I spend on takeaway last month?" is a simple question. In most finance apps, answering it means picking a date range, finding a filter and squinting at a chart.
In Pursly, you type the question. The assistant answers with the same numbers the rest of the app shows, because it reads them from your actual transactions rather than estimating. It works the other way too: "42 at the hardware store" becomes an expense, and "make a food budget of 400 a month" sets one up.
The rule I cared most about: it never changes anything on its own. Every expense, budget or edit it proposes comes back as a card, and nothing is saved until you tap Confirm.
Almost every budgeting tool resets on the 1st. Almost nobody is paid on the 1st.
In Pursly, your month starts the day you choose. That one change fixes a surprising amount, like rent landing in the "wrong" month, or a budget that looks blown on the 28th when your pay arrives on the 25th. You get a heads-up at 80% and again when you reach the limit, once each, not on every coffee after that.
There's something absurd about a tool that helps you spot forgotten subscriptions arriving as another subscription. So Pursly isn't one.
It's free to start, with a few assistant messages every day to try it. Pursly Lifetime is a single payment: it unlocks the full assistant and shared spaces on every device you sign in on, and there's no renewal date to forget. The assistant does have a monthly allowance, because every question costs real money to answer, and I'd rather say that up front than quietly limit it later.
I built Pursly for people like me: freelancers, students, creators and anyone early in their career, whose income is uneven and whose spending is lumpy, and who doesn't have a spare evening a week for bookkeeping.
If you've quit an expense tracker before, you're exactly who I made it for. It doesn't need you to be disciplined. It just needs you to connect your inbox, and then get on with your week.
Get Pursly on the App Store, and if you try it, I'd love to hear what works and what doesn't. I read every message.