Most household-budget apps in Japan ask for your bank login on day one. Pokeibo doesn't, and won't.

This is the first design question someone is going to have, so it's worth answering up front. The answer is short: Pokeibo reads your spending from a PayPay Card CSV that you export once a month and import yourself. No OAuth, no Moneytree-style aggregator, no live connection to your accounts. Your data stays on your phone.

How it actually works

Once a month, you log into the PayPay Card site, download the previous month's CSV, and open Pokeibo. The app parses the CSV locally, sorts each line by merchant using a hand-curated Japanese dictionary, and gives you a clean monthly view — totals, categories, trends. The CSV file never leaves your device. There's no cloud sync, no account, no server-side processing of any kind.

If you've used Moneytree, Money Forward ME, or Zaim, you know the alternative: you hand over your bank credentials to a third-party aggregator, who then scrapes your transactions in the background. The convenience is real. So is the surface area. You're trusting that aggregator's security, their privacy policy, their acquisition path, and every employee who has access to the system that sits between you and your bank.

What you give up

Real-time updates. With Pokeibo, your view is as fresh as your last import. If you bought coffee an hour ago, it's not in the app yet — and won't be until you import next month's CSV.

For some people that's a feature. The whole point of the kakeibo tradition is occasional, considered reflection, not real-time tracking. You sit down once a month, look at what happened, decide what to change.

For other people, that's a deal-breaker. They want the live dashboard, the push notification, the running tally. Pokeibo isn't for those people, and that's fine.

Why I built it this way

Two reasons. The first is privacy in a practical sense: I didn't want to operate a service that holds anybody's banking credentials, however well-encrypted. The risk profile is wrong for a one-person studio, and frankly wrong for most kakeibo users — the convenience-to-risk ratio doesn't favour the user.

The second is simpler. I don't want another app to own a piece of my financial life. I'd rather click once a month than wonder, every day, what some company is doing with my transaction history. Pokeibo is the app I want to use; it turns out a few other people want it too.

PayPay Card CSV is the v1 starting point because that's what I use myself, and what most of the early users I've spoken to use. v2 will likely add a few more issuers' CSV formats. If your card isn't on the list and you'd like it to be, send me the CSV header row at jerome@ohayostudio.com and I'll consider it.

Pokeibo launches in late July.

https://pokeibo.jp