📒 Ledgerly
Business expense tracking with local receipt OCR. Your data, your one-time price.
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.
Ledgerly, as it actually looks — a real screenshot, not a mockup.
Features
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.
Multi-currency done right
Every expense snapshots the exchange rate at entry time — editing a rate later never rewrites history. One-click recalculate when you do want to update an entry.
Recurring expenses
Monthly/weekly/yearly templates with a daily sweep that materializes due instances — including catch-up for missed days.
CSV & PDF export
Properly escaped CSV with ISO dates for your accountant, plus a tabular monthly PDF report via pdf-lib.
Ledgerly vs Expensify
Expensify at $5/user/mo runs roughly $60/year — $120 over two years. Ledgerly is $29, once.
| 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.
Three steps, no subscription
Buy once on Whop
One-time $29 for the packaged Windows installer — no per-user pricing, no monthly invoice.
Run it locally or on a VPS
Desktop mode is zero-config with data in your user profile. Need it reachable from your phone or team? docker compose up on a $5 VPS.
Drop receipts, review, done
OCR prefills vendor, amount and date for your review, budgets track themselves, and month-end is one CSV or PDF export.
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/ledgerly-expenses. 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.
Does it do approval workflows and corporate card feeds?
No — Expensify genuinely wins for teams needing multi-level approvals, direct card feeds and reimbursement rails. Ledgerly is built for freelancers, solo consultants and small businesses tracking expenses for taxes and reporting.
What happens to my data if I stop using it?
Nothing — it's one SQLite file and a receipts folder on your own disk. Back up by copying two things. There's no account to cancel and no export ransom.
Deep-dive comparisons:
Own Ledgerly forever
$29 once. Deploy on your own server — your data never leaves it. No renewal, no account with us, no meter. Or build it yourself from the MIT source — it's the same app.