An expense tracker with nothing to sell.

Kharcha reads the transaction alerts your bank already sent you, turns them into a record of your spending, and keeps that on your phone. It is free, and it stays free.

How the SMS part works

Banks and UPI apps already send you a message for every transaction. Kharcha reads those from your inbox, finds the amount, the merchant and the card digits, and offers you an entry. The reading and the interpreting both happen inside the app, on the device.

No message is uploaded anywhere — not to a server, not to a third party, not for classification. There is no background service: scanning happens only while you have the app open. The permission is optional and the rest of the app works without it, and adding detected spends automatically is off until you turn it on.

If you want the backup locked too

Signing in copies your records to your own private cloud space so a lost phone is not lost data. You can also set a password of your own, and then the merchant names and notes are encrypted on the phone before they are uploaded — so the backup is unreadable even to whoever holds it.

That password never leaves the device and is not stored, which means nobody can reset it for you. Your spends on the phone stay readable either way: forget it and you lose the backup, not your records. Length is what protects you, so a phrase beats a short code.

Why it is built this way

A money app is trusted with the most legible record of your life there is. Plenty of them monetise exactly that. Kharcha has no advertising, no analytics SDK, and no arrangement with anyone who lends money — not as a current policy, but as an absence of the code that would make it possible.

The privacy policy describes what the app does, and the source is public so the description can be checked rather than believed.