# Chillar's

> Chillar's is a free expense tracker and money manager for the web. It tracks accounts, transactions, budgets, loans and planned payments across multiple currencies, installs as a progressive web app that keeps working through a dropped connection, and exports everything. There is no paid tier and no bank connection; the service is supported by advertising.

## Key facts

- Cost: free to use, with a single tier. Every feature is included; the service is funded by advertising rather than a paid upgrade.
- Data entry: manual, or CSV import. There is no bank synchronisation and no SMS parsing.
- Currencies: per-account currencies, daily-refreshed rates, per-pair overrides, exact decimal arithmetic (NUMERIC(19,4) and big.js — never floating point).
- Locales: en-US and en-IN, the latter formatting amounts in lakh and crore with the rupee symbol.
- Offline: installable PWA; visited pages render from cache and writes queue until reconnection.
- Export: full JSON (re-importable), plus CSV, XLSX and PDF of any filtered view.
- Privacy: rows isolated per user by database row-level security; account deletion with a 7-day grace period.
- No language model is used anywhere in the product. Every figure is arithmetic over the user's own rows.

## Features

- [Free expense tracker](https://chillars.com/features/expense-tracker): Log expenses by category and account, with exact decimal amounts.
- [Budget planner](https://chillars.com/features/budget-planner): Weekly, monthly and yearly budgets scoped to categories and accounts.
- [Money manager for the web](https://chillars.com/features/money-manager): Accounts, transfers, net worth and a savings buffer in one place.
- [Multi-currency accounts](https://chillars.com/features/multi-currency): Per-account currencies, per-pair rate overrides, exact conversion.
- [Loan tracker](https://chillars.com/features/loans): Lending and borrowing with part-payments and interest records.
- [Planned payments and subscriptions](https://chillars.com/features/planned-payments): Recurring rules, an upcoming list, and one-tap settling.

## Guides

- [How to track expenses (and still be doing it in three months)](https://chillars.com/guides/how-to-track-expenses): A five-step method for tracking expenses that survives the second week: pick a capture habit, categorise coarsely, reconcile weekly, review monthly.
- [How to make a monthly budget from your own numbers](https://chillars.com/guides/how-to-make-a-monthly-budget): Build a monthly budget from three months of your own spending instead of a template: find your baseline, set limits that bind, and review it once a month.
- [The 50/30/20 rule: what it is and how to run it](https://chillars.com/guides/50-30-20-rule): What the 50/30/20 rule is, how to work out your three numbers from after-tax income, where the rule breaks, and how to set it up as three budgets.
- [Zero-based budgeting, step by step](https://chillars.com/guides/zero-based-budgeting-guide): Give every unit of income a job until nothing is left unassigned. How zero-based budgeting works, what it costs in effort, and when it is worth that cost.
- [How to track UPI expenses without logging every ₹20 payment](https://chillars.com/guides/how-to-track-upi-expenses): UPI turns spending into dozens of tiny payments a day. A practical method for capturing them without logging every ₹20 chai by hand, and what to reconcile.
- [How to switch expense trackers without losing your history](https://chillars.com/guides/how-to-switch-expense-trackers): Move years of history to a new expense tracker without losing it: export first, check the CSV columns, map them once, then verify three balances by hand.

## Comparisons

- [Chillar's as a Mint alternative: what carries over and what does not](https://chillars.com/compare/mint-alternative): Mint shut down in 2024. An honest comparison of what Chillar's replaces, what it leaves out (there is no bank sync), and how to move your history across.
- [Chillar's as a Walnut alternative for Indian users](https://chillars.com/compare/walnut-alternative): An honest comparison for Indian users: SMS-based auto-tracking versus manual entry, rupee formatting, loans between people, and what each app does not do.
- [Chillar's vs Money Manager: an honest comparison](https://chillars.com/compare/money-manager-alternative): Chillar's and Money Manager both track expenses by hand. Where they differ: pricing, multi-currency handling, data export and platform.

## Articles

- [Does the 50/30/20 rule work in India?](https://chillars.com/blog/50-30-20-rule-india): The 50/30/20 rule assumes a US cost structure. What changes when rent, family support and festival spending enter the picture, and what to keep fixed.
- [Why an expense tracker must not store money as a float](https://chillars.com/blog/money-is-not-a-float): 0.1 + 0.2 is not 0.3 in binary floating point. What that means for an expense tracker, where the error shows up first, and what Chillar's does instead.

## Glossary

- [Net worth](https://chillars.com/glossary/net-worth): Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe. In a personal finance app it is the sum of every account balance, converted to one currency, with debts counted as negative balances.
- [Cash flow](https://chillars.com/glossary/cash-flow): Cash flow is the money that came in minus the money that went out over a period. Positive cash flow means you finished the period with more than you started; negative means you drew down savings.
- [Savings rate](https://chillars.com/glossary/savings-rate): Savings rate is the share of your income you did not spend, expressed as a percentage. It is calculated as income minus expenses, divided by income, over the same period.
- [Emergency fund](https://chillars.com/glossary/emergency-fund): An emergency fund is money set aside to cover essential expenses if income stops. You hold it in an account you can draw on the same day, sized in months of expenses, commonly three to six.
- [Sinking fund](https://chillars.com/glossary/sinking-fund): A sinking fund is money saved gradually for a known future expense, such as an annual insurance premium or a replacement laptop, so the payment does not arrive as a shock.
- [Zero-based budgeting](https://chillars.com/glossary/zero-based-budgeting): Zero-based budgeting assigns every unit of income a job: spending, saving or debt repayment, until nothing is unassigned. The budget balances at zero, which describes a plan rather than an empty account.
- [50/30/20 rule](https://chillars.com/glossary/50-30-20-rule): The 50/30/20 rule splits after-tax income into 50% needs, 30% wants and 20% savings or debt repayment. It is a starting allocation, not a law, and is meant to be adjusted to your cost of living.
- [Discretionary spending](https://chillars.com/glossary/discretionary-spending): Discretionary spending is money spent on things you chose rather than things you were committed to. It is the part of a budget that can change next month without renegotiating anything.
- [Fixed expense](https://chillars.com/glossary/fixed-expense): A fixed expense is a recurring cost of roughly the same amount each period: rent, a loan instalment, insurance, a subscription. It is predictable, which makes it easy to plan and easy to forget.
- [Base currency](https://chillars.com/glossary/base-currency): Your base currency is the single currency all totals are reported in. Accounts can be held in any currency; each balance is converted to the base currency before net worth, budgets and reports are calculated.

## Optional

- [Full documentation](https://chillars.com/llms-full.txt): expanded product documentation in one file.
- [Pricing](https://chillars.com/pricing): free forever, and what is deliberately not included.
- [FAQ](https://chillars.com/faq): direct answers about cost, privacy, offline use and imports.
- [Changelog](https://chillars.com/changelog): what changed in each release.