Tally
A money app that reads your bank's SMS.
February 2026 to now · iPhone and Android · English and Arabic
My vision for Tally is personal finance for everyday people in places where banks don't share data. In Canada, the US and Europe, people have tools like Monarch Money and Cleo, because those apps can connect to their banks. Banks in Egypt don't let apps connect to your account, so nothing like that existed here. With Tally, it does: people can track their money, manage it together with their partners and friends, and have real tools and real financial literacy.
It works because 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
I built every feature in Tally for a problem my friends and I actually had: tracking our spending without typing it in, tracking our investments, splitting bills. Now we use Tally together.
Privacy was the main principle. 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. So your transactions are kept on your phone. Today each message is still read by a model on a server before it's saved. To move that part onto the phone too, I trained Talea, a small model 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.
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, a screenshot is often all it needs to solve 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