Pattiyal: AI expense tracker

The problem

Expense trackers are either too simple or too complex. And most store your financial data on their servers.

What I built

Pattiyal is a free personal expense tracker built entirely with Claude Code. All data stays in your own Google Sheets. No external servers, no subscriptions — your financial data never leaves your Google account.

The app syncs transactions directly from Gmail, parsing bank and UPI notification emails automatically. You interact with everything through Kanakku, an AI chat assistant. Tell it to log an expense, ask for your monthly spending breakdown, or have it categorize a week's worth of transactions — all through conversation.

A chat-first interface was the right call for v1. Expense tracking is inherently quick and informal — the kind of thing you do while walking out of a store. A conversation is faster than navigating forms and dropdowns.

The design constraint

Your data never touches a third-party server. Everything lives in your own Google Sheets on your Google Drive. The AI runs through your own API key. There's no account to create, no database on our end, nothing to breach. Privacy isn't a feature — it's the architecture.