Most personal finance apps start with the same assumption: that you want to build a budget. You don’t. You just want to know where your money went. That’s a completely different thing, and almost nothing on the App Store treats it that way. Enter Taffy, a new iOS app built around one simple idea: sort your transactions into buckets, one tap at a time, and let the picture emerge on its own.
There are no spending limits to set, no categories to configure in advance, no weekly check-ins to feel guilty about skipping. Taffy pulls your bank transactions through Plaid, stacks them up like a deck of cards, and you just tap each one into a bucket. That’s the whole loop. It’s almost absurdly simple, which is exactly why it works.
Built by a solo developer named Terris, the app launched recently on Product Hunt with a refreshingly honest pitch: “does anyone else want this?” Based on the concept alone, the answer is yes. A lot of people want this.
What Taffy Actually Does: Key Features
Taffy keeps the feature list short and deliberate. Nothing here feels tacked on. Every part of the app exists to serve the core idea of spend awareness without the homework.
The Card Deck Sorting Interface
Each transaction shows up as a card with the merchant name, date, and amount. Below it, your category buttons wait. One tap sends it to the right bucket. Frequent merchants get auto-tagged as Taffy learns your habits, so your third Uber ride of the month sorts itself. The whole thing feels closer to a casual phone game than a finance app, which is a genuine design achievement.
Auto-Tagging for Repeat Merchants
Once you’ve bucketed a merchant once, Taffy remembers. Next time that charge appears, it groups similar repeat transactions together and suggests the bucket automatically. You just confirm. This means the app gets faster to use over time, not slower. Your Spotify, Netflix, and Con Edison charges will basically sort themselves after the first pass.
Spending Dashboard by Category
After sorting, the dashboard shows every category sized by how much you spent, compared to last month. Up or down, at a glance. No scrolling required. The whole month fits on one screen with a clean circular breakdown and a line-by-line category list. It’s the kind of view that makes you go “oh, that’s where it went” without any mental effort.
Long-Term Trends and Top Merchants
You can zoom from this week out to this year, or all-time. Taffy tracks your top merchants across every period and shows you month-over-month spending charts per category. So if you’ve been curious whether your coffee spending has crept up since January, the answer is right there waiting.
How Sofia Used Taffy on a Sunday Morning
Sofia, a 29-year-old graphic designer in Toronto, had been telling herself for months that she’d “get serious” about tracking her spending. She’d tried two budgeting apps and abandoned both within a week. The setup was too involved. The category mapping felt like a chore. She never stuck with it.
At 9:30 on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, she downloaded Taffy. She linked her checking account through Plaid in under a minute, read-only access, no bank login visible to the app. Seventeen transactions had stacked up from the past two weeks.
She worked through the deck in about four minutes. A few she tapped manually: the LCBO run went to Dining, the Shoppers Drug Mart visit went to Health. Her TTC transit charges and a Lyft ride were already grouped together with a suggested Transport bucket. She confirmed with one tap.
By 9:40, she had a complete picture of her last two weeks of spending. Dining was higher than she expected. Groceries were actually reasonable. She’d spent $47 on coffee across three different spots. She didn’t need a budget to feel that clearly. She just needed the picture. Taffy gave it to her in ten minutes flat, including download time.
How Taffy Takes You From Bank to Picture
Step 1: Connect Your Bank
Taffy uses Plaid for bank connections, the same infrastructure behind most major fintech apps. It’s read-only, meaning Taffy can pull transaction data but cannot move money. Works with Canadian and US banks. The connection takes under a minute.
Step 2: Sort the Deck
New transactions land in your inbox as cards. Tap a category button to bucket each one. Repeat merchants get grouped and auto-suggested. You can also split transactions or edit amounts for things like shared bills.
Step 3: See Where It Went
The dashboard assembles your spending story automatically. Every sorted transaction feeds the category breakdown, the monthly comparison, and the trend charts. Nothing to export, nothing to configure.
Step 4: Track Over Time
Switch between week, month, year, or lifetime views. Your top merchants surface at every level. The longer you use it, the richer the picture gets.
Pricing: Free to Start
Taffy is free to download on the App Store. With a free account, you get one bank connection and access to every feature in the app. Connecting more than one bank account moves to a monthly subscription, though specific pricing for that tier hasn’t been publicly listed yet. For most people tracking a single checking account, the free tier covers everything.
Worth Trying If You’ve Given Up on Budgeting Apps
Taffy is for people who want spending awareness, not spending rules. It’s for anyone who has tried a budgeting app, felt overwhelmed, and quietly uninstalled it. The tap-to-bucket approach is genuinely fast, and the auto-tagging means it gets easier every week. Right now it’s iOS only, with support for Canadian and US banks. If that’s you, it’s worth the two minutes it takes to get started. Download it free at taffybuckets.com and sort your first deck before your next coffee gets cold.
