About
A free expense tracker built for tax season.
Expense is a free expense tracker for people who file their own taxes: freelancers, self-employed folks, anyone with a side hustle. Drop in a receipt — snap a photo, paste a screenshot, or forward the email — and OCR reads the merchant and amount while the app suggests a category from the IRS Schedule C list. Expenses group into reports you name, mileage is logged on a map at that year's IRS rate, and at tax time you export a PDF per report or a ZIP of everything to hand to your accountant. No subscription, no ads.
What you get
Free, with no catch
No subscription, no per-user fees, no ads. Accounts start empty and stay free.
Receipts in, no typing
Snap a photo, paste a screenshot, drag in a PDF, or forward the receipt email. OCR pulls out the merchant and amount, AI suggests the category, and you just approve it.
Receipts by email
Every account gets a private email address. Forward a receipt there and the expense is created automatically, dated from the original email so your records stay honest.
Categories that match the IRS
New accounts start with a category list built from the IRS Schedule C lines, so what you track during the year maps straight onto your return.
Reports for every bucket
Group expenses into reports — Home, Work, Travel, whatever you call them — and each one keeps its own total.
Mileage, mapped
Log business drives on a map and the app works out the distance and the deduction at that year's IRS rate.
Duplicate detection
Upload the same receipt twice, or forward the same email again, and you're warned before a duplicate inflates your totals.
Export at tax time
Download a PDF per report with the receipts attached, or a ZIP with the CSV and every receipt image. Both are meant to be handed straight to an accountant.
Share with your household or accountant
Invite people with a code and everyone sees the same expenses. Other accounts stay fully separate.
Bring your own AI assistant
Connect your own MCP client — Claude, Cursor, any assistant that speaks MCP — by signing in with your account, no tokens to manage. Drop a receipt into the chat and it's captured and categorized from your own history, ask how much you spent on flights and get the exact total, or have the assistant build and export a report. Disconnect any app with one click in Settings.
Your data stays yours
No ads, no data resale, and the code is public on GitHub if you ever want to run it yourself.
Key facts
- Name: Expense
- URL: https://expense.labnotes.org
- Price: free — no subscription, no per-user fees, no ads
- Built for tax season: categories come from the IRS Schedule C lines, expenses group into reports you name, and mileage deducts at the IRS rate for the trip's date and type
- Receipt capture: upload, paste, drag-and-drop, or forward from email (images and PDFs)
- OCR reads the merchant and amount; an LLM suggests the category; you review and save
- Export: a PDF per report with receipts attached, or a ZIP of everything (CSV plus every receipt image)
- Mileage: map-based trips at the IRS mileage rate for the date and type
- AI assistant access: connect any MCP client (Claude, Cursor, …) by signing in with your account (OAuth) — the assistant can capture receipts, log mileage, answer spending questions, and build and export reports
- Multi-user accounts: share an account with an invite code
- Data stays in your account — no ads, no data resale
- Code is public on GitHub: https://github.com/assaf/expense
Start collecting this year's expenses.
Accounts are free and start empty. Add your first receipt in under a minute.