The thesis is simple: meet the product where it actually lives, small, private, household-scale money, with the least infrastructure that fully serves it. So every ledger is a Google Sheet in your own Drive, and the whole design follows from that one decision. Here is the full reasoning.
Your rent, mortgages, partner balances and net worth live in your own Google Drive, under your own login, never on ours. The most honest answer to "why should I trust you with my finances?" is that you do not have to. We never hold them.
With no database of ours sitting between you and your money, there is no breach surface for your household finances and no honeypot for anyone to target. The safest data is the data we never collect, and we collect none of yours.
Sign-in, email, storage and the ledger all run inside your own Google account’s free allowance, so each new customer costs us almost nothing. That is what lets the price stay small and fair: a light subscription with maintenance included, or a one-time setup you pay to change, plus add-ons only for the extra properties or tools you actually use.
Sign-in is Google’s. Email is Gmail. Your files sit in Drive and your ledger is a Sheet. Authentication, email deliverability, file storage and the datastore are each a hard, security-critical system we would otherwise have to build and secure. We let Google do what Google is trusted to do.
Any co-owner can open the Sheet and read the grid, export the whole thing, roll back with version history, or fix a cell by hand. Your data outlives the app. It kills the old fear of what happens to my data if the app dies. Nothing happens: it was always yours, sitting in your Drive.
No app store, no server to run, no domain to buy, no containers to manage. Getting started is pasting one small file and linking an ID inside the Google account you already have. Updates arrive on their own as a new version.
A household writes a few rows a day. Wrapping that in a big cloud database, clusters and a single-page app would add cost, fragility and complexity you would pay for and never feel. Tally is deliberately built to exactly the size the job needs.
Your finances stay yours from the first row to the last. That is not a marketing line. It is the architecture.
Every choice has a cost, so here is ours, in plain view. Tally leans on what a personal Google account can do, and that brings real ceilings: how much it can process at once, how many emails it can send in a day, how gracefully it handles two people writing in the very same moment. It is built for households and small co-owner groups, not for thousands of strangers hammering a single ledger at once.
The day a ledger truly needs to become a large, multi-tenant service with thousands of concurrent people, that is the day for heavier infrastructure, and we would say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. Until then, every reason above is a benefit, not a compromise.
Free to start. Runs on your Google account. Your data never leaves your Drive.