Privacy guide
How to track expenses without giving any app SMS access
Most popular expense apps in India lean on SMS permissions to auto-log transactions. If you'd rather not grant that access, here's how the alternatives work.
Free tier · 20 messages and 2 questions per day
Granting SMS read access to an app is one of the broadest permissions on a modern phone. It exposes every OTP, every bank alert, every personal message. Even when the developer is well-intentioned, the surface area is large enough that many users prefer to keep it locked down.
Google has also tightened the policy: only apps in narrow categories can ask for SMS_READ on the Play Store, and the dialog Android shows is intentionally alarming. If you've decided to never grant it, your options for expense tracking shift accordingly.
What you give up
Auto-logging. Every UPI / card / wallet transaction will require a manual entry. That sounds painful — but the actual cost depends on how fast the entry is. Spreadsheets are slow; bots are fast.
What you gain
- Cleaner data. No bank-template parsing errors, no marketing-SMS misclassifications.
- Cash visibility. Cash transactions are normally invisible to SMS trackers. Manual entry treats cash and digital identically.
- Smaller blast radius. No app on your phone with read access to OTPs and bank alerts.
- Better mindfulness. Typing the expense yourself forces a half-second of awareness.
Three approaches that work without SMS access
- A Telegram bot. You text the bot whatever you spent in plain English. The bot parses and stores it. Logging takes 3 seconds. Hisaab is one example.
- A note-taking app + monthly review. Drop a one-line note in Notes / Apple Reminders / Google Keep every time you spend. At month-end, transcribe to a spreadsheet. Works but is slow at the analysis end.
- A full PFM app in manual mode. ETMoney and similar will let you skip permissions and manually enter expenses. Works fine; the friction floor is higher than a bot.
What about UPI?
Most UPI apps (PhonePe, GPay, Paytm) show a personal transaction history inside the app itself. You can scroll back through it without granting any outside app permissions. Combined with manual logging for cash and occasional reconciliation, this is a workable pattern.