Self-hosted · open source

Your spending, delivered.

A private finance journal from the transaction emails you already receive. Forward them, and Tidings turns them into a calm daily record.

Try the demo View on GitHubFree · MIT licensed · runs on your hardware

Works with banks that email transaction alertsNo bank credentials, no aggregatorFive banks parsed natively, AI rescues the rest

The Tidings journal — a month of transactions grouped by day, with category pills and a budget summary

How it works

Your bank already sends the data.

Three steps, then the journal writes itself. No account linking. No aggregator. The emails go where you say.

01

Forward your alerts

Your bank already emails you when you spend. Point those alerts at an inbox you keep, and you're done with this step forever.

02

Tidings reads them

The merchant, the amount, the date — lifted from each alert and filed. Nothing about the email body crosses a boundary you didn't draw.

03

A journal emerges

Days, budgets, notices. The same data your bank has, finally in a form you'd want to read.

Runs on your hardware. Nothing goes to a model unless you add a key.

The daily journal

A ledger that reads like a diary.

Transactions grouped by day. Amounts right-aligned in tabular numerals. Quiet annotations when a category nears its monthly budget, when a merchant repeats, or when a day runs past its usual pace. No alarms. No red panels. Just clarity.

Daily grouping with on-pace, under, over states
Category pills that stay soft and quiet
Repeat-merchant counts and budget-pace annotations

Explore the demo →

The Tidings journal — a month of transactions grouped by day, with category pills and a budget summary

Category budgets

Soft targets, never hard limits.

Set an annual target per category and watch the pace, not the panic. Under pace, a category stays quiet. Past it, the row warms to rust. It will never shout.

Annual targets, broken into a monthly pace
Suggested targets, drawn from your last twelve months
A month-end projection from your typical spending

See budgets in the demo →

Category budgets — a ledger of per-category pace, YTD spent, monthly and annual budget, and variance, with over-pace rows warmed to rust

Monthly insights

Patterns, not prescriptions.

A briefing reads your spending in prose: month-over-month context, the categories that moved, the anomalies. It never tells you what to do.

A monthly narrative briefing, generated on demand
Month-over-month context across categories
Plain prose, not toasts or red dots

Read a sample briefing →

Insights — a monthly briefing in prose, with the categories that moved and notable changes

Private by construction

Nothing to send. Nothing to leak.

No promise to protect your data. A design where nobody else holds it.

No aggregators

Tidings never sees a credential. It only reads the transaction emails you forward.

Your infrastructure

Docker on your laptop, an IMAP poller on a Pi, or a Lambda chain in your own AWS account. The data path is yours either way.

Optional AI

Categorization and briefings can use OpenAI or Claude — with no keys configured, nothing ever leaves for a model. Whatever a model extracts is checked word-for-word against the original email.

Open & auditable

Every line of code is in the open repo. Fork it, audit it, trust it.

Read the architecture

Your data. Your path.

Your bank

Transaction alert emails

1

Email forwarder

you@yourdomain.com

2

Ingestion

IMAP poller, default · or Lambda in your own AWS

3

Parser

Merchant, amount, date

4

Tidings journal

Days, budgets, notices

Every hop runs on hardware you control.

Open source

Free, on your hardware.

The repo is the only distribution. No subscription, no commercial tier. The most useful contribution is a parser for a new bank's alerts or statements; the add-a-parser guide and its Claude Code skill build one from your own emails in a single session.

View on GitHub Try the demo

Local-first by default Five bank parsers MIT license

Three commands to a running journal

git clone https://github.com/tvhahn/tidings.git
cd tidings
docker compose up -d

Opens at localhost:8000. Demo mode by default, seeded with sample data.

The default path is an IMAP poller in Docker. An optional S3 + Lambda chain runs in your own AWS account.

Read the self-hosting guide →

github.com/tvhahn/tidingsPython · TypeScript

For agents

Agents can try it before you install.

Every Tidings surface is a versioned JSON API. The demo journal is served read-only at a public endpoint, so an agent can explore eleven months of a fictional household before you commit to anything.

Same routes as self-hosted OpenAPI schema included No signup, no token

Read the agent access guide →

Two requests, no key

$ curl 'https://gettidings.com/demo/api/v1/summary?month=2026-03'
{
  "current": {
    "year_month": "2026-03",
    "total_spending": 4923.98,
    "spending_count": 54,
    "deposit_total": 5221.44,
    "by_category": {
      "rent": { "amount": 2150, "count": 1 },
      "internet": { "amount": 80, "count": 1 },
      … 18 more categories
$ curl 'https://gettidings.com/demo/api/openapi.json'

Real output, fictional household. Self-hosted installs get the same routes with bearer-token auth.

Frequently asked

The short version.

Long version: read the README in the repo. Tidings is built in the open.

Which banks work with Tidings?

Any bank or card issuer that emails structured transaction alerts can be supported through a parser. Five Canadian institutions ship today: RBC, CIBC, MBNA, Simplii, and PC Financial. Alerts from any other bank are captured for review rather than dropped; the next answer covers what happens from there.

What if my bank isn't supported?

Alerts from an unrecognized bank land in the Needs review queue, where you can retry them, enter them by hand, or set them aside. Turn on "Rescue unreadable emails with AI" in Settings and most are recovered automatically: the email body goes to your configured AI provider, and the extracted transaction is checked word-for-word against the original before it's saved. Prefer a permanent fix? Open an issue at https://github.com/tvhahn/tidings/issues with three or four sample alerts, personal details stripped. Not every institution will be tractable.

Does Tidings need my banking password?

No. Tidings never touches your bank account. You forward transaction emails; the app parses them. That's the whole loop.

Is there a mobile app?

Not today. The web app is responsive and works well on a phone browser. The phone notification sent on each transaction (ntfy push by default; SMS via Twilio or SNS) is the closest thing to a mobile experience right now.

Can I export my data?

Yes: a backup zip with transactions.csv plus your category, override, and budget config as JSON. Your data is yours; nothing is held hostage by a subscription.

How much does it cost to self-host?

Nothing. The default IMAP poller path runs on a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, or any always-on machine. There is no cloud cost, and it is the path most users should pick. An AWS Lambda path is also available for users comfortable with cloud infrastructure; it runs in your own AWS account and the free tier covers most personal volumes (a few hundred transactions a month). Either way, no subscription.

How is Tidings different from Firefly III or Actual Budget?

Mostly by where the data comes from. Firefly III is a full double-entry finance manager; Actual Budget is a local-first envelope budgeting app. Both are built around bank sync, file imports, or entering transactions yourself. Tidings reads the alert emails your bank already sends — no bank credentials, no aggregator, no manual entry — and turns them into a daily journal. Pick those projects for accounting or strict budgeting; pick Tidings for a spending record that maintains itself.

Eleven months, already delivered.

The demo is the full product running in your browser, seeded with a fictional household. Yours is three commands away.