A quieter way to keep track of your money
SpendWise is a self-hosted expense and budget tracker. It exists for people who would rather understand their own numbers than be sold a picture of them.
What SpendWise is
SpendWise is a personal finance tracker you can run yourself. You record what you earn and what you spend, sort it into categories, set budgets, and get charts that show where your money actually went. It is built for people who want a clear answer to one question: can I afford this, and what did I spend already?
The application is deliberately unglamorous. It does one job thoroughly: it keeps an accurate record of your own numbers and turns them into something you can act on. Everything it shows is calculated from transactions you entered, which means you always know where a figure came from.
Who it is for
SpendWise suits a particular kind of user more than others.
- People who want to see where their spending goes without building a spreadsheet from scratch every month.
- Anyone who has been caught out by a surprise expense and wants an allowance that adapts to how the month is actually going.
- Households or freelancers who juggle several income sources and need a single combined view.
- People who prefer to hold their own financial records on infrastructure they control, rather than in someone else's SaaS dashboard.
Why it works the way it does
Two decisions shape almost everything else in the application.
Most budgeting tools tell you how much you spent in a month that has already finished. That is interesting, but it is not useful in the moment you are deciding whether to spend. SpendWise's daily budget works differently: it divides your monthly allowance by the real length of the month, adds back whatever you did not spend on earlier days, and subtracts what you overspent. The result updates as you use the app, so the number reflects today.
The second principle is honesty about scope. A budget tool that cannot see your bank can only be as good as your record-keeping, and pretending otherwise would be misleading. So SpendWise stays on the side of telling you the truth: here is what you told us, here is what it adds up to, and here is what it cannot verify.
What it is not
- It is not a bank. It never holds, safeguards, or moves money, and it does not connect to bank accounts or card networks.
- It is not an investment, insurance, tax, or accounting product, and it does not give financial advice.
- It is not a subscription product. There are no paid plans, no credits, and no payment details are ever collected.
- It is not an analytics service. Your finances are not used for advertising, profiling, or AI training.
Your data stays yours
Because the software is self-hosted, the data lives wherever you or your instance operator chose to put it. Imports and exports happen in your browser, so files do not pass through the server. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is collected.
Security you can inspect
Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, one-time tokens are stored hashed with their own expiry, sign-in is rate limited, and repeated failures lock an account temporarily. The Terms of Service describe your responsibilities and our limits.
Who runs this instance
SpendWise is open, self-hosted software, so the party responsible for running the instance you are using is its operator. Questions about this page, or about an instance in particular, can go to support@spendwise.smartinvoicegen.online.
See it for yourself
Creating an account takes a name, an email address, and a password. The features page covers what you get, and the FAQ answers the questions people ask most.
Create an account