How it works Privacy Pricing CoCarlo The research Help
Now on Android · Coming soon to iPhone

A visual diary
of your spending.

Record purchases with photos, notes, and voice, then revisit your financial life as a journal.

Other apps observe your accounts.
Carlo is a record you intentionally keep.

Logging a purchase in Carlo: a photo of a pizza marked as a memory, amount $32.00, category Eating Out, subcategory Restaurant, payee Mimi's Pizza, paid by credit card, and a Log it button.
Say it, snap it
A few seconds, no typing
A Carlo diary, scrolled back through two days: Sunday, Aug 23, $82 — the original West Side Story at the Paris Theater and a subway violinist on the way — and Saturday, Aug 22, $39, each with a collage of that day's photos.
Your scrollable diary
Every purchase, a moment
Carlo's daily view for September 12th: nine spending categories as rings — Eating Out, Entertainment, Giving, Groceries, Household, Personal Care, Pets, Snacks and Transportation — with Household at minus 17 and Transportation 5 over, and $190 under overall, $324 spent and $961 left.
Your daily allowance
What you can spend today
Logging a purchase in Carlo, with a photo, amount, category and payee.
A Carlo diary scrolled back through two days, each with a collage of that day's photos and a written note.
Carlo's daily view with nine category rings and what's left to spend today.
Your scrollable diary
Every purchase, a moment

Your amounts, payees, notes, journal and photos are encrypted on your device. Carlo never has the key to decrypt them. Exactly what Carlo can and can’t see →

iPhoneComing soon Get it on Google Play
See how it works →

End-to-end encrypted · No bank connection required · No ads

Logging a purchase in Carlo: a photo of two people at dinner marked as a memory, amount $42.00, category Eating Out, subcategory Restaurant, payee Kebab Wala, paid by credit card, captioned

Notice it

Budgeting starts
with attention.

Carlo is manual on purpose. Recording a purchase is the moment you notice it — the small act that turns spending into a practice instead of something you discover later.

Say “treated Lisa to dinner at Kebab Wala, forty-two dollars.” Carlo fills in the amount, payee, category, and note. Snap a photo and a transaction becomes a memory.

  • Photo
  • Voice
  • Amount
  • Memory
A day in a Carlo diary — Thursday, Aug 20, $379 — opening to a collage of that day's photos and then each purchase listed with its own thumbnail: Sweetgreen $15.45, Starbucks $7.57, Fairway $47.57, Angel X's Cleaners $33.00, and Dr. Singh $275.00.

Live with it

Every purchase,
a moment.

Dinner, groceries, travel, gifts, ordinary life. Each entry keeps the photo, the caption, and the small detail you’d otherwise forget — so scrolling back through a month reads like a journal rather than a statement.

  • Your day, as it actually happened: photos, captions, and amounts together.
  • Voice entry learns your payees and suggests as you go.
  • 10 hand-designed themes, from Ledger to Midnight to Sky.
Carlo's weekly review for Aug 16 to Aug 22, $721: a collage of the week's photos, a

Look back

Reflection turns
spending into practice.

Every Sunday, Carlo invites you to look back at the week: what you spent, what stood out, and a place to write down what you noticed. Nothing to interpret, nothing to feel bad about.

At the end of the month, a closeout walks you through the photos, the memories, the life you actually lived.

Why looking back works →

“Small daily habits, kept faithfully, become a life. A budget is no different.”

From real Carlo users

Money is what
your life looked like.

Dinner, groceries, birthdays, small routines, strange little Tuesdays.

The research

Keeping track helps. Carlo is built on it.

Behavioral research calls it self-monitoring: keeping track of what you do, and checking it against what you meant to do. It’s a well-studied tool in behavior change (Harkin et al., 2016).

Carlo keeps you in the practice. Recording a purchase takes a few seconds, and our bet is that those seconds are worth keeping.

The science behind Carlo →
  1. PurchaseSomething happens.
  2. PauseA few seconds, in the moment.
  3. RecordPhoto, voice, amount, note.
  4. AwarenessYou notice it.
  5. Your next choiceYours to make.
138

randomized studies: prompting people to monitor their progress improved goal attainment, mostly for health goals. Harkin et al., 2016

29

studies of 12 financial self-control strategies: on average, using a strategy reduced spending or increased saving. Davydenko et al., 2021

17–19%

fewer unarranged-overdraft and unpaid-item charges with just-in-time alerts. Grubb et al., 2025

Privacy

Your financial life
belongs to you.

Carlo encrypts your entries with AES-256-GCM, the same algorithm Signal and Apple rely on, applied field by field. Your entries are encrypted with your key before they reach our servers — a subpoena to Carlo produces ciphertext we can’t read.

  • Your journal is encrypted.
  • We don’t sell your data.
  • You decide whether to connect your bank.

If you turn on Bank Reminders, the connection is read-only and limited to transactions. Connect through SimpleFIN and the credential stays on your phone. Connect through Plaid and Carlo’s servers hold the credential that keeps it open — so which bank, and which dates, are visible to us. Your journal stays encrypted either way.

How Carlo handles your data → Exactly what Carlo can and can’t see →
A day in a Carlo diary — Sunday, Aug 16, $87 — with photos, three purchases, and a personal reflection the person wrote about a boy selling lemonade reminding them of their own childhood.
One shared CoCarlo day seen from Alex's account: Today, $53, with Levain and Dunkin' Donuts tagged as Fiona's, and El Rancho Nuevo untagged as Alex's own.
The same shared day seen from Fiona's account: the entries she added appear untagged, and El Rancho Nuevo is tagged Alex.

CoCarlo

Built for a life
you share.

One space for the parts of life you hold in common: groceries, rent, travel, a household. Everyone keeps their own private Carlo; the shared space stays separate.

It’s not a merged account. It’s a shared diary of the life you’re building, alongside your own.

  • You share the space, not your password, your bank account, or your personal Carlo.
  • One plan covers your whole household.
Explore CoCarlo →

Carlo is
different on purpose.

Manual enough
to make you notice.

Most finance apps make passive observation the default. Carlo asks you to record it yourself, a few seconds at a time, every purchase. That act is where change begins.

Smart enough
to help when life gets busy.

Say it out loud and Carlo fills in the amount, payee, category, and note. A few seconds, no typing. Optional Bank Reminders can surface purchases you may have forgotten.

Private enough
to actually be yours.

Your Carlo record is encrypted, there are no ads, we don’t sell your data, and connecting a bank is your choice.

See the full comparisons

Pricing

One plan.
Everything included.

$9

per month

or $79/year · 30-day free trial

Get Carlo

Need a lower price?

If $79/year isn’t workable for you, Carlo is available with Community pricing for $29/year.

  • End-to-end encrypted, and your data is never sold
  • Photo journal: every transaction, a moment
  • Intelligent voice entry that learns your payees and suggests as you go
  • Always know what’s safe to spend today
  • Ask Carlo: AI that answers your questions in natural language
  • CoCarlo shared spaces, so one plan covers your whole household
  • Optional Bank Reminders, for help catching purchases you missed
  • Monthly, annual and bills budgeting
  • Charitable giving as a first-class category
  • 10 hand-designed themes
  • No bank connection required
  • No ads

Keep a better record
of your financial life.

iPhoneComing soon Get it on Google Play
See how it works →

30-day free trial · No credit card required