About Portofelo
Portofelo is a budget tracker and receipt scanner for iPhone that works without a bank connection. You photograph a till receipt, the app reads every line item and files each one under its own category, and your spending history stays in a database on the phone.
Two things matter more than the rest of the feature list. It is fast — an expense typed in by hand is recorded on the spot, with no sign-in and no server to wait for, and a receipt becomes categorised line items from a single photo. And it costs almost nothing: the free plan is a real one, and Pro is €2.99 a month.
We build the app and write the blog that sits alongside it. This page covers why it works this way, how we write, and where Portofelo is the wrong choice.
Why we built it
Most budgeting apps open by asking for your banking credentials, then hand you a feed of merchant names. It is an impressive setup flow and a disappointing month two: the categories are guesses, cash is invisible, and a re-authentication prompt arrives every six months whether you wanted it or not.
The other thing month two exposes is friction. An app that takes a sign-in, a sync and four taps to record a coffee is an app you quietly stop opening, and no amount of charting makes up for a month with half the entries missing.
The part we wanted was the part those apps skip — knowing what you bought, not just where you paid. That only comes off the receipt. So the app reads receipts line by line, treats cash as a real account rather than an afterthought, and asks for no banking access at all. Fewer conveniences, a much better answer at the end of the month.
What we optimise for
Logging an expense has to be quicker than skipping it
Type an amount and it is recorded — no sign-in, no network round trip, no spinner while a server confirms something. It writes to the database on the phone, which is why it is instant rather than merely quick. Scanning replaces the slowest job in budgeting: one photo does the line-by-line split you would otherwise type out. Budgeting habits do not die of missing features, they die of friction in week three.
The phone is the default, not the fallback
Your transactions live in a database on the phone, so the app opens and records spending on a plane or in a basement car park. Offline is not a degraded mode bolted on at the end — it is how the app normally runs, which is why there is no account to create before you can log your first expense.
Receipts tell you more than a bank feed
A bank feed knows you spent €62 at a supermarket. The receipt knows €14 of it was snacks. We put the work into reading the receipt line by line because that is the level at which spending decisions are actually made, and it is the level no bank connection can reach.
Almost free, and the free plan is a real one
The free plan puts no cap on transactions, budgets or accounts and includes 50 receipt scans a month, which is more than most households produce. Pro is €2.99 a month for unlimited scans, encrypted backup, sync and CSV export — a fraction of what the bank-connected apps charge, because there is no open-banking provider to pay for every user. That subscription is the whole business model: no advertising, and nothing about your spending is sold on.
How we write about money
The blog and the free calculators are not a content farm attached to an app. Competing apps get installed and used for a fortnight with real spending before they are written about, because the point at which something becomes annoying is what decides whether you still use it in six months — and it is the part reviews skip.
Where a price or a figure appears in a post, it was checked against the source on the date stated. European figures come from Eurostat and the ECB. App pricing comes from the current store listing, not from another article. Where Portofelo is the wrong answer for what you need, the post says so — an article that recommends us every time is worth nothing to you and not much to us either.
Elena Marek
Writes about budgeting and builds Portofelo
I build Portofelo, an offline-first expense tracker for iPhone. I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit inside other people's budgeting apps, and I write about what actually works.
More about Elena→What Portofelo is not
- It is iOS only
- There is no Android build yet. When there is, it will be on the homepage rather than behind a waiting list.
- Scanning needs a connection
- The receipt photo is read by an OCR service rather than on the phone, so that one feature needs internet. Manual entry, budgets, reports and your whole history do not.
- Nothing arrives from your bank
- Every transaction is scanned or typed. If you want a feed that fills itself in, an open-banking app will suit you better — and the blog says so too.
- It is not financial advice
- The app records what you spent and the blog explains methods. Neither is regulated advice, and neither knows your circumstances.
On privacy, the short version is that your spending lives on your phone and a receipt image leaves it only for as long as the scan takes. The long version, including every third-party service involved, is in the Privacy Policy.
Try it, or tell us what is missing
Free on the App Store, with no account and no bank connection. If it does not do something you need, that message is how the next version gets decided.