FiluWe 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.
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.
Four things we won't compromise on
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
Money is the most private thing on your phone
Filu treats your data that way. It reads only bank and wallet messages, stores them encrypted in your private account, and your financial data is never sold or used for ads — not to advertisers, not to anyone.
- Bank and wallet messages only — your personal messages are never sent
- Read-only, bank-and-subscription-only access to email
- No ads, no data brokers, no exceptions
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 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 bank formats
Clear about what Filu costs
Filu is free to download, and Filu Premium is a monthly subscription that unlocks the extra features. We'd rather tell you the truth about what Filu can't do yet than oversell what it can.
- Free to download; Filu Premium is one monthly subscription
- Cancel any time from your Apple account
- We say what Filu doesn't do yet, not just what it does
Small team, specific focus
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.