Our story
We were tired of not knowing where the money went.
Filu started as a few founders in Cairo, annoyed at their own spreadsheets. Not a fintech pitch — a personal itch: too many banks, too many cards, and a phone full of SMS nobody ever went back to read.
How it started
Three banks. Two cards. A subscription list nobody remembers agreeing to.
Between us: three banks, two cards each, a couple of installment plans, and subscriptions that quietly renewed every month. Every few weeks someone would open a notes app and promise to finally track it all — starting next month. Next month never came.
The receipts kept piling up in the SMS inbox — unread, unsummed, ignored — because no one has the discipline to log a purchase by hand every single day, forever. So we stopped trying to fix our discipline and looked at what we already had.
The bank already tells you.
Every purchase, every withdrawal, every subscription renewal — your bank already sends a message about it. We didn't need another app asking us to type numbers in by hand. We needed something that reads what the bank already sends. That's Filu.
What we believe
Four things we won't compromise on
Automation over discipline
Discipline doesn't survive a busy week
Every budgeting app before Filu asked for the same thing: log every purchase, every day, forever. That doesn't survive a busy week, so those apps get deleted by week three. Filu doesn't ask you to log anything — it reads the message your bank already sent.
- No manual entry, ever — not even once
- Works quietly in the background on the message your bank already sends
- Still there for you in month six, not just week one
Privacy first
Money is the most private thing on your phone
Filu treats your data that way. Parsing happens on-device where it can, we read the least amount of data needed to do the job, and your financial data is never sold — not to advertisers, not to anyone.
- SMS parsed on-device — the raw message never leaves your phone
- Read-only, bank-and-subscription-only access to email
- No ads, no data brokers, no exceptions
Built for how MENA actually banks
Built from the SMS up, not the API down
Most finance apps are built for bank APIs that don't exist here yet. Filu was built the other way around — starting from the bilingual Arabic-English messages that Egyptian and MENA banks actually send, in the formats they actually use.
- SMS-first, because that's how banks here notify you
- Arabic and English, switchable anywhere in the app
- Built and tested against real Egyptian and MENA bank formats
Honest and transparent
Free during beta, plainly and without a catch
If that ever changes, you'll know before it happens — not after. We'd rather tell you the truth about what Filu can't do yet than oversell what it can.
- Free during the beta — no trial clock, no hidden tier
- Clear notice before anything about pricing changes
- We say what Filu doesn't do yet, not just what it does
Filu in numbers
Small team, specific focus
EN · AR
Languages, switchable anywhere
On-device
Where SMS parsing happens
0
Ads, ever
Cairo
Where it's built
Who's behind Filu
Filu is built by BugSquads, a small software studio in Cairo. We're not a funded fintech team — we're the people who got tired of guessing where the money went, and decided to build the tool we wished we had.
Come build it with us
We're early. Join the beta and help shape what Filu becomes.
Free during the beta. No ads, ever.