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About

A budget tracker
built in Kuala Lumpur,
by one slightly tired person.

Started as a spreadsheet for splitting groceries. Turned into an app because the spreadsheet refused to be carried around in a pocket.

2,400+
Active wallets
4.8 ★
Play Store
240
GitHub stars
MIT
Licensed
The story

It started with a Maybank receipt nobody could read.

April 2025. Three roommates, one shared grocery run, one crumpled receipt at the bottom of a Jaya Grocer bag. The receipt was unreadable. So was the math. So was the WhatsApp thread that followed.

I made a spreadsheet. Then a second tab for the cat. Then a third tab for the trip we took in May. Eight tabs later, the spreadsheet was unusable on a phone, and the original problem — "track the small things, easily, with the people I share them with" — was further away than it had been with a receipt.

There were finance apps. I tried four. None of them did shared wallets without paying. None of them did Malaysian receipts. All of them wanted me to log in with my email and a password I would forget by Tuesday.

So I taught myself Flutter — partly because Flutter looked fun, partly because I wanted both Android and iOS without writing it twice. The first prototype was deeply ugly. The second was less ugly. By the fifth one, I could scan a receipt at the petrol station, tag it as Groceries, and have it back in my pocket before the engine warmed up.

That’s the goal of PocketFi: the smallest amount of friction between you and an accurate picture of your money. No bank logins (yet). No subscriptions. No ads. No "premium" gates on the features you came for.

Open source from day one because: (a) a finance app you can’t audit is a finance app you have to trust blindly, and (b) it makes me a more honest builder. If you want to read every Firestore rule before you sign up, here’s the repo.

What we believe

Four small rules.

1
Your data is yours.

We don’t sell, profile, or train on your transactions. The whole backend is auditable. Deletion is a button, not a 14-step support ticket.

2
Free should mean free.

No ads, no premium tier hidden behind the feature you actually came for. If we ever charge, it’ll be for an optional service like bank sync — the core stays free.

3
Small things, frictionless.

Most spending is small. Two-tap entry, on-device OCR, bookmarks for the things you do daily. The friction should be lower than not tracking.

4
Built in public.

Every release is a GitHub release. Every roadmap item is a public issue. Decisions get debated in the open. PRs welcome.

Who’s behind it

Just the one person, so far.

BY

Boon Yong Yang

Founder, designer, lone Flutter dev · Kuala Lumpur

Former software engineer. Started PocketFi to fix a personal annoyance — it’s now a few thousand active wallets and growing. Spends Saturdays writing Dart and drinking too much oat-flat-whites at Starbucks. Yes, that’s logged in the app.

@boonyongyang mail hello@pocketfi.app
From there to here

One year, seven moments.

Apr 2025
A spreadsheet that wouldn’t shut up
It started as a Google Sheet for tracking pasar malam runs and roommate splits. Two months in, it had eight tabs, a broken pivot table, and one very annoyed roommate.
Jul 2025
First Flutter commit
Decided to teach myself Flutter the productive way — by building the app the spreadsheet wanted to be. Riverpod, Firebase, and a navy/yellow color picker. That was the start.
Sep 2025
v1.0 on Google Play
Manual entry, 17 categories, wallets, the Timeline and Overview tabs. Open-sourced on day one under MIT — the only honest way to release a finance app.
Nov 2025
Budgets v1 + first paying-attention users
Per-category budgets, overdue bill tracking. Crossed 200 active wallets. The first GitHub PR came in from a stranger.
Jan 2026
Saving goals + bookmarks
Long-press to bookmark a merchant; tap once to re-enter. Saving goals with little progress bars. Onboarding dropped from 6 screens to 2.
Mar 2026
Receipt OCR, on-device
The hardest single feature so far. ML Kit, image cropping, field detection, fallback typing. ~94% amount accuracy on Malaysian receipts.
May 2026
Shared wallets, finally
The feature that started the whole thing, four releases late. Up to 8 members, per-member contribution view, three split modes. v1.4 ships this week.
How it’s built

The stack, no secrets.

Flutter
Single codebase, Android + iOS.
Riverpod
State management.
Firebase
Auth, Firestore, Storage, Crashlytics.
ML Kit
On-device receipt OCR.
Beamer
Routing.
Dart 3
Sound null safety, records.
GitHub Actions
CI / build / release.
Crashlytics
Anonymized crash reporting.

Say hi.

Feature ideas, complaints, oat-flat-white recommendations. All welcome.

mail hello@pocketfi.app Star on GitHub