Tally
A money app that reads your bank's SMS.
February 2026 to now · iPhone and Android · English and Arabic
Banks in Egypt don't let apps connect to your account. But every bank sends an SMS each time money moves, so the full record of your money is already on your phone.
Tally reads those messages and turns them into transactions. You see your spending, your income and the balance of every account and card, without typing anything or logging in to a bank. Insights shows where the month went, and your habits: the places you keep going back to, how often, and what you spend each time. It also splits a bill from a photo of the receipt and keeps track of who owes you, keeps shared budgets for a home or a trip, and tracks investments.
About 20 to 30 people test it today, on iPhone and Android. It's waiting for App Store review, and there's a waiting list at tally.tinqr.dev.
Why I built it
Every feature in Tally solves a problem I have, and that my friends have: tracking spending automatically, tracking investments, splitting bills. Now we use Tally together.
I also needed something private. I didn't want my transactions saved on some server, where a developer could look at them, or where they'd be used to sell me products or credit the way banks usually do. That was the main principle. Your transactions are kept on your phone. Today each message is still read by a model on a server before it's saved. Talea is how that part moves onto the phone too.
How I build it
I design Tally and build it with AI coding agents, mostly Claude Code. I work on it in the evenings, next to my job at Flash.
Most of the time I don't need detailed specs, because the context is documented throughout the repo. I set up my projects so everything is written down: work goes into a changelog, decisions go into a decision log, and a CLAUDE.md file is the brief for the project and an index to every other document the agent might need, the same way Fliki is built. So the agent usually knows what we're working on and what's planned. When there's a bug, I usually just send a screenshot and it solves it.
For a big feature, I lay out my thinking and write a detailed spec. We refine it with research into how market leaders, comparable apps and open source projects built the same thing. Then the agent builds it, and it goes through rounds of testing: the agent walks the flows first, then I test it on my phone, then it goes out to the testers.
What shipped, and when
- FebThe first version reads CIB's text messages, and Insights shows where the month went
- 16 AprIt reads messages from every bank in Egypt
- May–AugA pause while I travelled and focused on work
- 8 SepSplit a bill from a photo of the receipt, and send each friend their own message with what they had
- 10 SepA Shared tab for what you lent and what came back
- 21 SepArabic, on every screen
- 22 SepHabits and a day-by-day calendar in Insights
- 26 SepSplit a receipt someone else paid, and shake the phone to hide your figures
- 4 OctGroups for shared spending, and Investments
- 6 OctTalea, a reader for bank messages that runs on the phone
- 10 OctSubmitted to the App Store
Reading on the phone
I trained a small model, Talea, that reads bank messages on the phone itself. It runs inside Tally now, next to the server, and checks itself against it before it decides anything.