Gastos Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Gastos is a local-first iOS expense tracker that reads your MariBank and SeaBank email alerts and builds a private spending dashboard on-device. Best for privacy-conscious MariBank or SeaBank users on iPhone. Price: from about $5/year (PHP299), no permanent free tier. Rating: 7.1/10.

What is Gastos?

Gastos is an automated expense tracker for iPhone that connects to your Gmail with read-only access, finds your MariBank and SeaBank transaction alerts, and turns them into a clean spending dashboard. There is no typing, no spreadsheets, and no manual logging; card purchases, ATM withdrawals, and transfers are organized for you automatically.

It was built by indie developer Refino Kashi Kyle Estudillo and lives at maribank-tracker.kashi.dev. The pitch is privacy first: there is no backend and no servers, everything is stored in on-device SQLite, and your transaction data never leaves your phone. That is a meaningfully different stance from most finance apps, which sync everything to the cloud.

What Are Gastos’s Key Features?

Automatic email-based tracking

Instead of asking you to link a bank via an aggregator, Gastos reads the transaction email alerts MariBank and SeaBank already send you. It parses card purchases, ATM withdrawals, transfers, bills payments, and Shopee payments, so your ledger fills itself with zero manual entry.

Fully on-device, private by design

All data is kept in local SQLite storage on your phone. There is no backend, no tracking, and the app only ever has read-only Gmail access, so it can never touch your actual bank account or move funds. For people uncomfortable handing financial data to a cloud service, this is the headline feature.

Spending dashboard and heatmap

You get today, this week, and this month totals in Philippine pesos, plus a yearly spending heatmap that makes it easy to spot heavy-spend stretches at a glance. It is simple but genuinely useful for understanding habits over time.

Transaction management

You can swipe any transaction to mark it as voided (with undo) so your totals stay accurate, and you can add manual transactions for cash or unsupported sources. The developer has also flagged AI-powered spending insights and broader bank support as planned additions.

How Much Does Gastos Cost?

Gastos is a free download, but full access requires Gastos Premium at roughly PHP299 per year, about $5, or PHP25 a month. The App Store lists a few additional yearly tiers up to PHP999 depending on region and promotions. That is dramatically cheaper than the broader competition: Spendee runs around $15/year for Plus and $23/year for Premium, and Wallet by BudgetBakers is roughly $50/year. For a single-purpose tracker, $5/year is close to a no-brainer if the banks match yours.

Who Is Gastos Best For?

Use Gastos if you are an iPhone user in the Philippines who banks with MariBank or SeaBank and wants hands-off expense tracking without uploading your financial life to a server. The automatic email parsing plus the on-device privacy model is exactly what that audience wants, and the price is trivial.

Skip Gastos if you bank elsewhere, since it only supports MariBank and SeaBank today. Also skip it if you are on Android or want a web dashboard, because it is iOS 17+ only, or if you need multi-currency, shared household budgets, or deep reporting that broader apps already offer.

What Are the Best Gastos Alternatives?

Spendee

Spendee is a polished multi-bank budgeting app with shared wallets and category budgets, starting around $15/year. It is far broader than Gastos but syncs to the cloud and does not auto-parse Philippine bank emails, so you trade Gastos’s privacy and automation for wider coverage.

Wallet by BudgetBakers

Wallet offers bank syncing across many institutions, rich reports, and budgets for roughly $50/year. It is a powerful all-rounder for serious budgeters, but it is more expensive and stores data in the cloud rather than on-device.

Money Manager (Realbyte)

Money Manager is a long-running manual tracker with strong charts and a generous free tier. It works with any bank because you enter transactions yourself, which is the opposite of Gastos’s automation, but a good fallback if your bank is not supported.

Final Verdict: Is Gastos Worth It?

Gastos does one narrow thing extremely well: it quietly turns MariBank and SeaBank email alerts into a private, on-device spending dashboard for about five dollars a year. The local-first, no-backend design is rare and genuinely valuable, and the automation removes the friction that kills most expense-tracking habits.

The catch is the narrowness. It only supports two banks, it is iPhone-only, and full features sit behind a (cheap) subscription. If you are the exact user it targets, it is an easy recommendation. If you bank elsewhere or are on Android, wait for the promised expanded bank support before committing.