Ask Claude or ChatGPT about your money.
With your real numbers.

What an expense tracker MCP connector does

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that Claude, ChatGPT and other AI apps use to work with outside services. Instead of pasting a bank statement into a chat or exporting a spreadsheet every month, you connect HonestExpenses once. From then on the AI fetches exactly the numbers it needs while it answers you — the month's totals, spending by category, the ten largest purchases.

It runs on the AI subscription you already pay for: the model's work is covered by your Claude or ChatGPT plan, and HonestExpenses only answers its requests. Your data stays in your expense tracker; the AI asks for a piece of it when you ask a question.

How to connect Claude or ChatGPT

You need a HonestExpenses account signed in with Telegram — risky changes are confirmed there — on the Lifetime or AI plan. Then:

1. Claude.ai: Settings → Connectors → «Add custom connector». Paste https://honestexpenses.app/mcp and press «Connect».
2. ChatGPT: Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced settings → turn on Developer mode, then «Create»: paste the same address, authentication — OAuth.
3. Claude Code: run claude mcp add --transport http honestexpenses https://honestexpenses.app/mcp in your terminal.
4. A HonestExpenses page opens. Sign in if asked, check the app's name and where the answer goes back to, and press «Allow».

On that page you also decide whether the AI may propose changes. Leave it off and the connection can only read. Menu names in Claude and ChatGPT change now and then; the current steps are always in HonestExpenses → Settings → «Connect your AI (MCP)», next to the address and a copy button.

What to ask: example prompts

Ask the way you would ask a friend who knows your spending:

• «How much did I spend on food in September, and how does that compare with August?»
• «What were my five biggest expenses this month?»
• «Show my taxi spending per month this year — is it going up?»
• «Which recurring payments do I have, and what do they cost me per month in total?»
• «How am I doing against my groceries budget?»
• «What's the balance on each of my accounts?»
• «Record a coffee for 4.50 today and 32 for groceries yesterday.»
• «Move every Uber ride from Other to Transport.»

Behind the answers are the same tools the assistant inside the app uses: totals, spending by category, period comparisons, spending over time, transaction search, accounts and balances, categories, recurring payments, budgets and shared projects. The numbers come from your data, calculated by HonestExpenses — the AI doesn't guess them.

Reading is instant, changes wait for your yes

• Reading — amounts, categories, budgets, charts — happens at once.
• Changes — adding transactions, moving them to another category, changing a date or account, creating a category, budget or recurring payment — arrive as a plan with a preview. Nothing changes until you confirm it in the chat, and a confirmed change can be undone.
• Risky changes — deletions and anything that touches more than 20 rows, including several smaller changes that add up within ten minutes — need one more yes: the bot sends «🔐 Claude wants to: …» to your Telegram with ✅ Allow and ❌ Decline.
• Notes on transactions are shared only when the AI explicitly asks for them, cleaned of links, emails and phone numbers.

The Telegram step matters: a note or a category name could contain text that tries to steer the AI. Whatever the AI is told, deleting your data still needs your own tap.

Privacy and security

• No bank access. HonestExpenses never connects to a bank, so the AI sees only what you have logged yourself. More on that: expense tracking without a bank connection.
• You approve every connection on a HonestExpenses page, and each new one is announced in your Telegram with a link to revoke it.
• Tokens are stored as hashes only, never in plain form and never in logs. A connection ends after 90 days at the latest; then you approve it again.
• Revoke at any time: Settings → «Connect your AI (MCP)» → Connected apps → Revoke cuts access at once. Signing out everywhere disconnects every AI app too.
• Know where data goes: what the AI reads is sent to that AI service and handled under its own terms.

Which plans include the connector

The MCP connector is part of Lifetime — 19 $, paid once — and of the AI plan at 5,99 $ a month or 47,88 $ a year. It doesn't spend HonestExpenses AI actions: your own Claude or ChatGPT does the thinking. Fair-use limits apply — 60 calls a minute and 2,000 a day.

A new account gets 7 days of Pro with everything from Lifetime, so you can connect your AI and try it before you pay. To log on the go, use the Telegram bot: amounts, voice messages and receipt photos all land in the same account your AI reads.

Questions

Read next

• Log expenses by voice. One sentence, several transactions.
• Track Apple Pay purchases automatically. Pay in a shop — the expense records itself.
• Automatic expense tracking on Android. Pay with any card — the expense records itself.
• An expense tracker in Telegram. With a full app behind it.
• An expense tracker without a bank link. You log it — in seconds.
• How to track your expenses. And still be doing it in three months.