What Skimp is, in plain facts

What it is

A personal expense tracker that builds its ledger from bank SMS alerts

Platform

Android. There is no iPhone, web or desktop version

Built for

India: rupee amounts, Indian bank and UPI alert formats

Price

Free. No paid tier, no trial, no ads, no in-app purchases

Account

None. There is no sign-up, login or phone number to give

Network access

None. The release build does not request Android's INTERNET permission

Where data lives

A SQLite database in the app's private storage on the phone

Permissions

READ_SMS (optional, read-only), notifications, and a foreground service that lets a long import finish

Languages

English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam, Punjabi, Assamese, Santali, Meitei

Export

CSV, PDF, and an AES-256-GCM backup encrypted with your passphrase

Availability

In a closed test ahead of a public release

Published by

Rakshit Rabugotra

Indian banks send an SMS for nearly every transaction: a card swipe, a UPI payment, a salary credit. Skimp reads those alerts on the phone and extracts the amount, whether money came in or went out, the merchant and the account.

• A message it is confident about, from a bank it recognises, is added to the ledger automatically.
• A message it is unsure about waits in a review queue with the original text beside it, for you to confirm or correct.
• One-time passwords, promotions, payment reminders and personal messages are discarded. OTP digits are erased before anything else in the app reads the message.

The scoring is a set of deterministic rules combined with a 0.8 MB text classifier that ships inside the app. Nothing is sent to a server or to a hosted AI model. The step-by-step version is on the home page, and the list of recognised banks is on supported banks.

• Expenses, income, and transfers between your own accounts that do not count as spending
• One payment split across categories, custom categories and freeform tags
• Account balances, taken from the balance your bank states in its own message
• Monthly budgets, overall and per category, with a notification at 80% and at 100%
• Recurring transactions for rent, SIPs, EMIs and subscriptions
• A six-month trend, a spending calendar, top merchants and subscription detection
• Savings goals, and udhaar: a per-person record of money lent and borrowed
• Saved filters, a home-screen widget, and light and dark themes

Worth knowing before you install it, since no tracker suits everyone:

• No iPhone version. iOS does not let an app read SMS, so automatic capture cannot work there.
• No sync between devices. There is no server to sync through. Moving phones means exporting an encrypted backup and restoring it.
• Rupees only. There is no multi-currency support.
• No bank statement import, investment tracking or bill reminders.
• No shared or family ledger, and no AI chat assistant.
• Cash is not tracked automatically. A cash payment has no SMS, so it is a manual entry.

If one of those is the thing you need, the comparison with other trackers says which apps do it.

Most apps promise not to upload your data. Skimp is built so that it cannot: an Android app that has not declared the INTERNET permission is refused a network connection by the operating system. You can confirm it on your own phone under App info, Permissions, All permissions, where “full network access” is absent.

What the app handles, and what it does not, is set out in the privacy policy and the published Data Safety answers. The trade-offs of granting any app SMS access are covered in is SMS permission safe?

Skimp is built and published by Rakshit Rabugotra, an independent developer. It is not affiliated with any bank, payment app or lender, and it does not sell loans, cards or insurance.

Questions, bug reports and bank formats it gets wrong go to the support portal at support.skimp.rabugotra.com.