Why I built Tallyo: how my wife and I cut spending 30% in three months

I wanted a budget app that connected to my bank. A budget is useless if you cannot see every dirham going out, and I could not trust we were catching everything.

Living in the UAE, I tried Spendee. It had everything — bank sync, categories, charts, reports. I paid for the upgrade. But every time we wanted to update it, the bank sync took three or four minutes and needed logging in. So we did not.

A budget app you do not open is not a budget app.

Meanwhile, our credit card bill kept drifting further from the number we had told ourselves we would stay under. The gap was real. Spendee was just confirming what the bank's text messages already told us. Seeing the spending is not the same as changing it.

So I built Tallyo.

What a couples budgeting app actually needs

I had three rules going in, and almost every existing app breaks at least one of them:

1. It has to be faster to log than to skip logging. If putting an expense in takes longer than thirty seconds, the marginal entry never happens. The bill stays a surprise.
2. Both partners have to use it without it becoming admin overhead for one of them. Most "shared" budgeting apps are really one-person apps with a read-only viewer bolted on. That is not a shared budget. That is a spreadsheet with extra steps.
3. It has to confront you in the moment, not next week. Reports do not change behaviour. A category that turns amber the second you tap it — that changes behaviour.

Bank sync, charts, and predictive analytics are not on this list. None of them moved our spending. Logging did.

How Tallyo actually works

No bank sync. No reports I will not read. Just: tap a category, type a number, done. Notes are optional. The whole interaction takes three seconds — but those three seconds make you face the spend in a way a passive bank notification never does.

Every category is colour-coded in real time. Green means you are on track. Amber means you are spending faster than the plan allows. Red means you have already broken it. The colours update with every entry, so you walk around with a live read on which parts of your month are still flexible and which are not. That is the part that changes behaviour. You glance at the app before the second coffee, see amber, and the second coffee just stops happening.

And when a category does run out, you cannot quietly overspend it. You have to borrow from another category — explicitly, in the app — which means another part of your month has to give. The total stays the same, but the choice becomes conscious. That single rule is the thing that turned a budget into a plan we actually stuck to.

My wife Angela and I share one budget across two phones. She logs hers. I log mine. Both feed the same running total in real time. Sometimes I have to nudge her — did you put that lunch in? — but most of the time we just both see where we are.

What changed in four months

Four months in, our spending is down by roughly a third and has stayed there. Same family, same life, same city. We did not pick up couponing. We did not stop going out. Groceries cost about what they always cost — the savings came from elsewhere.

What changed is what we did with the discretionary money — the cafe stops, the ice cream runs, the takeaway because we did not feel like cooking. Those add up faster than any single big-ticket category. With colour-coded categories live on both phones, the decision in front of the till is no longer "do I feel like this?" — it is "is this category green or amber right now?" Most of the time the answer is still yes, go ahead. Some of the time it is no, leave it. The "some of the time" is where the 30% lives.

To be clear: 30% is what we got, with our spending pattern. Your number will be different. The mechanism — confronting the spend in the moment, on a shared running total, instead of reviewing it later — is what generalises. The percentage will not.

What this is not

Tallyo is not a financial planner. It will not optimise your retirement allocation. It does not connect to your investment accounts. It does not predict next month's spending or tell you which category to cut.

It is the simplest possible answer to are we on track today? — built for two people, on two phones, who actually want to know.

If that is the question you have been trying to answer with a Spendee, YNAB, or Mint alternative, Tallyo might fit. If you want forecasting and Sankey diagrams, we are not for you, and that is fine.

Get Tallyo

Tallyo is live on the App Store. The PWA also runs at tallyobudget.com for anyone not on iOS.

The app did not fix anything. Logging did. Tallyo just made logging easy enough to actually happen — for both of us.