Why we built a budget app that never connects to your bank

The usual way, and the idea behind ours

Most budgeting apps get your transactions by connecting to your bank, usually through a data service such as Plaid. You approve the connection once, and new transactions come in on their own. It works well, and for many people it's the right choice.

Some people would rather not connect their bank to another app, whatever the reason. Without a connection, the usual options are typing purchases in by hand or downloading files from the bank. We wanted to offer a way to track spending that doesn't involve either one.

Transaction alerts turned out to be that way. Most large US banks offer them, and they go to an inbox you already have. The information is already coming to you; it just needs organizing.

How it works

1. You turn on email alerts at your bank, with the amount set as low as it goes.
2. A Gmail filter collects those alerts under one label. Our guides walk through both steps.
3. You sign in to Bankless Budget with Google and tell it which label to read.
4. When you import, it sends the subject, sender and text of each alert to Google's Gemini AI, which picks out the merchant, amount, date, the card used and a suggested category. You can change any of it.

On the Free and Plus plans you start each import yourself. On Pro, alerts are imported as they arrive.

What you don't need

• Your bank username or password
• Your account or routing numbers
• A connection to your bank that needs approving, renewing or removing

Your bank is never involved beyond sending the alerts you asked it for. You can remove Bankless Budget's access at any time in your Google Account settings.

What we can see

When you sign in, Google asks you to approve three things:

• Read-only access to your Gmail. Google grants this for your whole mailbox, because it has no way to limit an app to one label. We only ever fetch messages from the label you choose. That limit is enforced by our code, not by Google. The permission can't send, delete or change email.
• Access to one spreadsheet in your Google Drive, the one we create if you export your transactions. Nothing else in your Drive.
• Your name and email address, to identify your account.

For each alert we read, we store its subject, sender and text, along with the transaction details taken from it: merchant, amount, date, category, and the card's name or last four digits if the alert includes them. Our Privacy Policy describes exactly what is sent to Gemini and what is kept.

What this approach doesn't do

• Balances. Alerts describe purchases, so we can show what you spent but not what's in your account.
• Older history. We can only import alerts that are in your Gmail. If you just turned them on, your history starts now.
• Banks without email alerts. If your bank doesn't send them, we can't import from it.
• Cash. Cash spending doesn't produce an alert. You can add it by hand.

Setup also takes a few minutes per bank, where linking is usually a single approval. If balances, investments or years of history matter most to you, an app that connects to your bank is the better fit. If you mainly want to see where your money goes, without connecting anything, that's what we built this for.