Why I built this.

In 2018 I was $30,000 in credit card debt. A friend told me about a practice from a 12-step program for people with spending problems: keeping your numbers. It just means recording everything you spend. I started logging every transaction, every day, in an app called AndroMoney. Within a year I was out of debt.

I kept going. After eight years I had a huge amount of data. But getting real insight out of it always meant exporting the data to a spreadsheet and manipulating it there. That worked when I had the enthusiasm for it. When my enthusiasm waned, I fell off. The logging continued but the understanding stopped.

AndroMoney was functional but clunky. I tried other apps, but they required me to connect my bank account before I could even access the product. That was an immediate no. The whole point of this practice — for me — is the conscious act of recording. Handing that to a bank sync defeats the purpose entirely.

The moment I decided to build it

I started building software tools with Claude Code for my own business in early 2026, and somewhere in that process I realized: I could build this myself. Not just a logging app, but one that gave me the visibility and analysis I'd always had to construct by hand in spreadsheets. The kind of app I'd actually wanted for eight years.

I also realized something about the habit itself. Manual tracking had permanently changed the way I think about money. Not because of the data — because of the pause. Every time I logged a transaction, I spent two seconds being conscious of what I did. That's it. That's the whole mechanism. It sounds almost too small to matter. It isn't.

Most finance apps either do too much or log passively in the background. Neither builds the habit. When your bank sync does the work for you, you stay in the dark — just with better-organized darkness. Francis is built on the opposite premise: the friction is the feature.

What Francis is — and isn't

Francis is not a comprehensive financial planning tool. There's no retirement calculator, no net worth tracker, no debt payoff scheduler. If you want those things, other apps do them well. Francis does one thing: it builds the habit of knowing where you are before you spend, every day. If you check in once or twice a month, you're flying blind the rest of the time. Francis is designed to make the thirty-second daily check-in so easy that you actually do it.

There's no bank connection. There never will be. You log what you spend, and Francis shows you what that means in real time — not just totals, but how much you have left per day for the rest of the month. That number changes behavior in a way that a monthly summary never does.

Built on real feedback

I use Francis every day. It's the only financial tracking tool I use. I've shown it to my friends and anyone who'll listen, and I'm constantly incorporating what I hear — making it faster, simpler, easier to pick up and stick with.

Francis is built by one person. That means it moves fast, stays lean, and never has to justify a bad decision to a committee. It also means I read every email. If something isn't working for you, tell me: alex@francis.finance.

Alex Marcus
New York, NY