How Daily Spend works
Built around one idea: passive awareness changes behavior more than dashboards do.
1. You get a private, secure inbox
Daily Spend creates a private email address just for you. There's no bank login and no password to share — Daily Spend never connects to your bank at all.
2. You point your bank's alerts at it
Add that address to your bank and switch on its transaction alerts, so every purchase your bank already emails you is delivered there instead. We walk you through it for your bank — with an assistant if you get stuck.
It's entirely read-only: we only ever read the alert emails you route to that address.
3. We total today's spending
As each alert arrives, we read the merchant and amount, sum today's purchases in your local timezone, and set aside credit-card payments as debt paydown rather than spending.
4. The widget updates on your lock screen
You add the widget once via iOS lock-screen customization. From then on, iOS refreshes the number every 15–30 minutes in the background. You never open the app — you just glance.
What we deliberately don't do
- No budgets, allowances, or pacing math.
- No spending categories or AI labels.
- No notifications or streaks.
- No historical analytics.
If you want a dashboard with charts, categories, and weekly reports, plenty of apps do that well. Daily Spend is the opposite of those products on purpose.