FAQ
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.
Expense is a free expense tracker for people who file their own taxes — freelancers, self-employed folks, anyone with a side hustle. You drop in a receipt (photo, screenshot, PDF, or a forwarded email), it reads the merchant and amount, files the expense under the right category, and keeps the totals ready for tax season. No subscription, no ads. Try it at https://expense.labnotes.org.
That's the whole point. Categories are built from the IRS Schedule C lines, expenses group into reports you name (Home, Work, a client, whatever), mileage deducts at the IRS rate for the trip's date and type, and you can export a PDF per report or a ZIP of everything to hand to your accountant. It's expense tracking set up to make tax season boring.
Drop in a receipt image or PDF and OCR reads the merchant and amount; an LLM suggests the category. You review the details and save — no typing the numbers yourself. You can also paste with Cmd-V, drag a file onto the page, or forward a receipt email to your personal address.
Yes. No subscription, no per-user fees, no ads. You create an account, add receipts, export at tax time — it all stays free.
Yes, out of the box. New accounts start with a category list built from the IRS Schedule C lines — the same expense lines on the return — so the totals you track during the year line up with what you report. You can add your own categories on top.
Yes. Log a drive on a map and Expense works out the distance and the deduction at the IRS rate for the trip's date and type (business, charity, medical, or moving) — the rates come from the IRS automatically, no setup. Mileage rows export right alongside receipts.
Yes. Your account gets a private email address — forward a receipt email to it and the expense is created automatically, dated from the original email. Only senders you approve are imported, and forwarding the same email twice won't double-count.
Two ways. A PDF per report with the receipts attached, or a ZIP containing a CSV and every receipt image. Both are plain files that work offline — download, send, done.
Images, including HEIC from an iPhone, and PDFs. You can upload them, paste with Cmd-V, drag them onto the page, or forward a receipt email to your personal address.
You get a warning before it's saved, so a duplicate can't quietly inflate your totals. That covers re-uploading a file and forwarding the same email again.
Yes. Share the account's invite code and anyone you invite sees the same expenses. Other accounts stay fully separate — nothing leaks between them.
In your own account. Expense runs no ads and sells no data; receipts and expenses stay scoped to your account and export as PDF or ZIP whenever you want. The code is public on GitHub if you want to see exactly how it works.
That's who it's for. Free, quick receipt capture with OCR and AI categories, Schedule C–based categories, reports per client or project, map-based mileage at the IRS rate, and one-click exports for your accountant.
Yes. Expense speaks the Model Context Protocol (MCP) at /mcp: point any MCP client — Claude, Cursor, or another assistant — at the endpoint and approve the connection by signing in with your account; nothing to configure. The assistant can capture receipts (images or PDFs) through the same OCR pipeline as the web app, log mileage, answer spending questions from your actual data, move expenses into reports, and export a report PDF. You can disconnect any connected app — or delete its tokens — from Settings at any time.
Expense is built and maintained by Assaf Arkin (https://labnotes.org). The code is public on GitHub at https://github.com/assaf/expense.
For personal and small-team expense tracking, yes. Expense is free, reads receipts with OCR, suggests categories, tracks mileage at the IRS rate, and organizes everything into Schedule C–based categories and reports for tax filing. Expensify is a corporate expense platform — approval workflows, reimbursements, accounting integrations — and its free tier caps you at 25 SmartScans a month, with paid plans billed per user. If you run a company with employee expense policies, Expensify fits. If you just need your own expenses tracked for taxes, Expense does it free.
Accounts are free and start empty — add your first receipt in under a minute.