A first look at Aaptam

Most of my time outside work right now goes into Aaptam, a product I am building properly, from research to release. It is still in development, so this is a first look rather than a launch.

Aaptam is an expense tracker built around one idea: logging money should take seconds, not discipline. Snap a photo of a bill and it reads the merchant, every line item and the tax, ready for you to review.

The part I am most excited about is Tam, the AI assistant at its centre. Tam is not a chatbot that writes paragraphs of advice. It has 35+ tools it can use to act on your records, such as adding transactions, adjusting budgets, tracking goals and checking what bills are coming up. Its answers come back as interactive widgets, like a budget progress card or a list of upcoming subscriptions, instead of walls of generated text. Anything destructive needs your confirmation, and every feature also works by hand for people who would rather not use AI.

A few principles are shaping it:

• Free to track, with no ads. The app should never have a reason to sell what it learns about you.
• Your month starts on payday. Budgets and reports follow your salary date, not the calendar.
• UPI, cards and cash in one place, with transfers between your own accounts never counted as spending.
• Local-first. Records start on your device, with optional backup to your own Google Drive.

Under the hood it is a React application shipped to Android with Capacitor, backed by Supabase, Firebase and serverless functions.

Aaptam started as a Pludo experiment and is now growing into its own product and brand. The Android app is in closed testing, and I will share a proper deep dive when it launches.