Writing 2 min read
Introducing: plans and AI credits
Tracking money in Money Diary is free forever. What the paid plans meter, what a credit buys, and why free is genuinely usable.
Zain Haroon — Full-stack Engineer
The bill for running Money Diary splits cleanly in two. Storing your transactions costs me close to nothing. Running a language model over them costs real money per message.
So the meter sits on the second part only. Core budgeting is free forever: unlimited transactions, savings, goals, wishlist, accounts, recurring rules, analytics. Paid plans meter AI credits, receipt scanning and file storage.
What a credit is
One pool, spent by anything that calls the model. AI chat and receipt scans draw from the same monthly balance rather than separate per-feature caps, so you decide what your credits go on instead of the app deciding for you.
| Plan | Price | Credits | Receipt scanning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 / month, 10 / day | No |
| Plus | $4 | 1,000 / month, no daily cap | Yes |
| Pro | $10 | 4,000 / month, no daily cap | Yes |
The free plan’s daily cap resets at midnight UTC. The monthly pool is what it says on the tin.
Where you can see it
The assistant shows what a conversation has spent, and the credit meter opens into the detail: what is left this month, and what the day’s cap is if you are on Free. No surprise wall, no quiet degradation into a worse model.
Free is genuinely usable
This is the part worth saying plainly, because “free tier” usually means a demo. Every ledger feature works on Free. You can run your whole financial life in it and never spend a credit — the manual forms cost nothing, and they do everything the assistant does.
What you give up is the typing. Fifty credits a month is enough to log the things you cannot be bothered to type, which for me is the grocery run and anything with a receipt.
Upgrading
Plan changes go through a request I review, rather than a card form that charges you before anyone has looked. Manual, slower, and appropriate to a project this size: I would rather answer you than automate a payment flow I cannot support at 3am.