Expensify charges $5 per user per month, forever — and every receipt photo you snap (often showing card numbers and home addresses) goes to their cloud. Ledgerly does the same core job on your own machine or $5 VPS: expenses, budgets, reports, recurring templates, and receipt OCR that runs entirely in your browser. $29 once, nothing uploaded, ever.
If you've searched for a Expensify alternative, Ledgerly is the pay-once option worth putting at the top of the list: Ledgerly is $29, one time, and covers the same core job Expensify charges $5/user/mo for.
What makes Ledgerly the pick for 2026
- Local receipt OCR — Drop a JPG/PNG receipt and tesseract.js runs entirely in your browser — no image ever leaves your machine. Vendor, amount and date are parsed and prefilled for your review; OCR never auto-saves.
- Fast expense entry — Quick-add row + full form: amount, currency, category, vendor, date, project, payment method, notes, receipt image.
- Filterable, sortable list — Date range, category, project, vendor/notes search, sortable columns.
- Categories & budgets — Editable category set with color + icon. Monthly budgets per category with progress bars that shift amber past 80% and red past 100%.
- Reports & charts — Month picker, spend-by-category donut, daily spend bars, top vendors, month-over-month delta.
Ledgerly vs Expensify, at a glance
| Ledgerly | Expensify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29 once | $5/user/mo ($60/user/yr) |
| Receipt OCR | Local, in-browser, free forever | Cloud |
| Your receipts leave your machine | Never | Yes — their cloud |
| Multi-currency with rate history | Included | Paid tier |
| Recurring expenses | Included | Paid tier |
| Budgets with alerts | Included | Paid tier |
| Cost over 3 years (solo) | $29 | $180 |
| Cancel and keep your history? | Nothing to cancel — it's your SQLite file | Cancel = lose access |
Pays for itself vs Expensify in about 6 months for a solo user — faster with every additional team member, since there's no per-seat fee.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/ledgerly-expenses-mvp. The $29 buys the packaged installer, 1-click setup and lifetime updates.
Does the receipt OCR upload my images anywhere?
No. tesseract.js runs client-side — in your browser or inside the desktop app's window — and the worker, wasm core and language data are all served from the app itself, never a CDN. Receipts with card numbers and addresses on them stay on your disk.
How accurate is the OCR?
It parses vendor, amount and date and prefills the form flagged for your review — it never auto-saves an expense. Expensify's SmartScan, backed by cloud models and human fallback, is honestly more accurate on crumpled or unusual receipts; the trade is that every one of those receipts goes to their servers.
The bottom line
Ledgerly won't out-feature Expensify on every axis — no subscription tool with a bigger team and a bigger roadmap loses on everything. But for the core job, $29 once against $5/user/mo forever is a trade most people should at least look at. Ledgerly is part of OneTimeSuite, a catalog of pay-once apps that replace subscription SaaS.
Try Ledgerly — $29, once
Expenses, budgets, multi-currency, recurring templates and in-browser receipt OCR — no cloud, no per-seat fee.