The problem
Almost nobody knows where their money goes. Most people can’t say where 1 of every 5 pesos ends up.
Finance apps don’t solve it because logging takes effort: open the app, find the category, fill in fields. Two weeks later people quit.
The idea
Kipu takes another route. Logging means typing “tacos 150”, sending a voice note or a photo of the receipt in a chat you already have open all day. You can also send your bank statement PDF and close WhatsApp while it’s processed.
And instead of waiting for you to open the app, Kipu writes to you: reminders, payment alerts and your habit journal.
Tracking your money should cost the same as texting a friend.
What it does
It tracks your debit, credit and cash accounts, with each card’s statement and payment dates. It has budgets, goals and savings pockets with CETES-style simulated returns. You can share accounts with your partner or roommates, and charge a friend with a link they can open without Kipu.
To understand your money it gives you your financial health, cash flow, where it goes and a named profile, like “Freelancer with a slow leak”, plus projections like “you’ll be out of debt in about 8 months”. And to keep you hooked: streaks, achievements, a weekly league and a Wrapped-style monthly recap to show off.
It wasn’t my idea
My partner, Emanuel Alvarado, brought Kipu. He made it exist; my job was to close out development and get it to beta. Finishing something you didn’t start is a different skill, and I wrote about it.
Read the piece →How it’s built
It’s four parts that share contracts: a FastAPI backend on Supabase as the source of truth, the web app and PWA in Next.js 15, the iOS and Android app in Expo, and the WhatsApp agent in LangGraph with about 80 tools. Everything runs on Google Cloud Run and deploys from GitHub Actions.
When you send a message, the agent groups the ones that arrive back to back, loads your context (accounts, balances, rules, memory) and Gemini on Vertex decides which tools to use, with Claude as a fallback if it takes too long. The reply comes out in bubbles, the way a person would write.
One source of truth
The principle that repeats most in Kipu: every piece of data lives in one place. Plan limits, onboarding, achievements and release notes live in the backend, and the web, the app and the agent all read from there.
We learned it the hard way. Every time something lived in two places, it ended up saying different things: the landing page once promised 15 messages when the real cap was 100.
Every time something lived in two places, it ended up saying different things.
Where it is today
It launched as a beta in June 2026 and has around 50 users today. Now we’re opening it to the general public, with the Android app landing on Google Play.
The challenge isn’t getting users anymore, it’s activation: turning the first message into a habit. That’s what we’re working on.
