Hormi

Tracking your expenses should not feel like a second job. Hormi came out of a real frustration: expense apps do not work if you have to remember to open them. You download one, use it for three days with the best of intentions, and by day five you have forgotten it exists. If you live with someone, a partner, family, roommates, the problem multiplies. It is not that you do not care. The tool kept failing you.

Why I built it

Personal finance apps depend on you remembering to use them, and shared spreadsheets are a graveyard of good intentions. So I turned the question around: instead of asking people to change their habits, what if the product adapted to the habit they already have? Everyone uses WhatsApp, all day, every day. What if logging an expense were as simple as sending a message?

That is the whole idea. Taking care of the household’s money should be as easy as sending a WhatsApp. Nothing to download, nothing to learn, no friction.

What it does

Hormi lives inside WhatsApp. It is one more contact in your chat list, and you tell it your expenses the way you would tell a friend.

• Text, voice or photo. Type “spent 3,200 at the supermarket” and you are done. Or send a photo of the receipt. Or a five-second voice note while you walk. Hormi reads the context, extracts the amount, categorizes it and logs it. Seconds, no forms.
• It actually understands. Say “bought milanesas” and it knows that is groceries. A crumpled receipt gives it the amount, the date and the merchant. A rushed audio gets transcribed and logged on its own.
• Built for households. Most finance tools are designed for one person. Hormi was designed from day one for couples who share expenses, families who need to see the real budget, and roommates who want to stop chasing each other for money. Everyone logs, everyone sees the same numbers.
• Reports in the chat. Ask for the month and it answers right there: by category, by person, by period. No dashboard to open, no clicks, no waiting. The web app is there when you want the full picture.
• Your data is yours. Hormi only sees what you choose to send it. It has no access to your other conversations, does not store full messages, and the data is encrypted.

The name

“Hormi” comes from gastos hormiga, ant expenses: the small, repeated purchases that go unnoticed. A coffee here, a snack there, a subscription you forgot about. Each one looks like nothing. Together they can be a real share of your income. The problem with ant expenses is that they are invisible, and what you cannot see you cannot control. Hormi makes them visible. You do not need a rigid plan or a complex spreadsheet. You need to see the real number.

What makes it different

• It does not ask you to change your routine. No new app to open, no daily ritual, no data entry session. You send a message and get on with your life.
• It is about living together, not just counting.Sharing expenses is not only a math problem, it is a cohabitation problem. When everyone sees the same thing, conversations about money get simpler and there is less to argue about.
• No unnecessary complexity. No 47 categories, no 3D charts, no endless settings. It works from minute one. If you want custom categories, you ask for them in the chat.

How it is built

I built Hormi end to end: the web app, the WhatsApp and AI pipeline, the data model, billing and analytics. Incoming text, receipt photos and voice notes go through LLMs for extraction and categorization, with the household’s own categories and history as context. A single Hormi Plus subscription covers the whole household. There is also an MCP server, so other agents can act on a household: list expenses, add one, pull a summary.

React and Next.js in TypeScript on the front, Python on the back, PostgreSQL for data, Vercel and Cloudflare for hosting, PostHog for product analytics.

Where it is going

Hormi is available in Argentina, with the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries next. The longer goal is any household, anywhere, organizing its finances without effort. It is built with the people who use it: suggestions arrive through the same WhatsApp chat, I read all of them, and many of the improvements already shipped started as one of those messages.

What I want from it is simple. No surprises at the end of the month.