Why I am building Spento?

Most budgeting apps know where you spent money. Very few know what you spent it on.

My banking app could tell me I spent $84.32 at Whole Foods. It couldn't tell me that half of it was one week's worth of chicken, or that groceries had quietly crept up because I'd started doing three shops a week instead of two. The answer was sitting in a drawer full of paper receipts I was never going to type in.

That's the problem Spento is meant to solve.

No typing

Every tool I tried had the same catch: to get anything useful out, you had to do the data entry. Spento has two ways in, and neither one is data entry:

• Take a photo of a receipt. Spento reads the merchant, date, total, tax and every line item, and files it for you. PDFs work too.
• Forward the order email. Online orders already come with a receipt in your inbox. Forward it and it's logged. On Premium you get a private inbox address, so one mail filter can send everything from your usual stores automatically.

After that, you do nothing.

Categories in the order a month is spent

Most trackers give you a flat pile of tags and leave the sorting to you. A new Spento account starts with category groups in the order a month is meant to be spent: giving and savings first, debt and lifestyle last. Under those are sub-categories, from Natural Gas to Fun Money.

They're a starting point, not a rulebook. Rename them, recolour them, and delete the ones that don't apply to you. Set a monthly target on any of them and the budget page keeps track.

Things worth knowing, not another dashboard

I didn't want to build yet another dashboard you have to remember to open. So Spento sends one email a week with two or three things worth knowing, like "Two subscriptions renewed on the same day, which is why this week looks heavier than it was." It's on by default, and you can turn it off in settings.

And if you already spend your day in a chat window, Spento runs its own MCP server. Connect it to Claude, ChatGPT or any other MCP client and ask about your spending in your own words. It works both ways: you can log an expense or tick something off your shopping list the same way.

Built by one person, in the open

Spento is built by one person, and that's me. The free tier is the whole product, metered: 50 receipts a month. Premium raises the limits and adds the private forwarding inbox. Pricing is still being worked out, and nothing about your data changes if you start on free.

This blog is where I'll write about what I'm building, what I'm getting wrong, and what I learn from looking at real receipts. If you have a drawer like mine, start with one receipt.

Thanks for reading.

— Rayhan Shikder