Give your money its weight back.

Try it out

Notch gathers every account, card and subscription you hold into one ledger, records what each purchase was actually for in your own words, and reads the month back to you each morning.

The name

For forty-three thousand years, recording value was a deliberate act.

43,000 years ago
Lebombo Mountains

Twenty-nine careful marks, cut into a baboon fibula in a cave on the Lebombo range. It is the oldest known counting object in existence, and it predates writing by some thirty-eight thousand years.

1100s
The English treasury

The English Exchequer recorded every payment to the Crown as a notch cut into a hazel rod, sized by denomination: a thousand pounds took the width of a palm, a shilling took a nick. The rod was then split down its length, and the unique grain made each half unforgeable. The lender kept the longer piece, the stock, and became a stockholder. The system ran the national accounts for seven hundred years.

The last twenty years
Everywhere

Contactless payment removed the last deliberate step from a purchase. The average cardholder now makes several hundred transactions a year, each one settled in under a second and recorded as a merchant code they will never read.

Now
Notch

Notch restores the deliberate step. Each purchase arrives from your bank and waits for one line from you, spoken or typed, describing what it was for. Those lines become a month you can read back and account for.

The verb

To notch a purchase is to say what it was for.

Hold the button to commit the line. Notch learns the merchant as you go, so the next charge from the same place arrives already named and categorised.

STRIPE*CORNERSTONE CAFE TORONTO $11.40

Waiting to be notched
How it works

Spend. Log. Save. Decide.

Spend

Every account you hold, at every institution, sorted into what is yours to use, what is owed, and what is set aside. Recurring charges lay out across the month as a timeline of what has already been taken and what is still to come, converted from USD and carrying the sales tax your province or state adds. Per-category limits track against what you have actually spent.

Log

Every transaction in one place, searchable and filterable, each row carrying the merchant's own mark and the running balance of the account it moved through. Purchases arrive from your bank and wait to be described, by voice or by typing. Notch remembers the merchants you name, so each month asks you less than the last.

Save

Goals carry a projected completion date paced from your own contribution history, so the estimate reflects how you actually save. Give a goal a deadline and Notch holds back what it needs each month before it calls anything safe to spend. Contributions can route into a real savings account or sit as a figure you track.

Decide

One figure for what is safe to spend today, once bills, recurring charges and dated goals are accounted for. Under it: the pace you are spending at against the month so far, a cash-flow waterfall, what changed since last month, where the money went, your debt, and a forecast. Claude can read the same ledger and write it up in plain language, when you switch it on.

Spend

Every account you hold, at every institution, sorted into what is yours to use, what is owed, and what is set aside. Recurring charges lay out across the month as a timeline of what has already been taken and what is still to come, converted from USD and carrying the sales tax your province or state adds. Per-category limits track against what you have actually spent.

Log

Every transaction in one place, searchable and filterable, each row carrying the merchant's own mark and the running balance of the account it moved through. Purchases arrive from your bank and wait to be described, by voice or by typing. Notch remembers the merchants you name, so each month asks you less than the last.

Save

Goals carry a projected completion date paced from your own contribution history, so the estimate reflects how you actually save. Give a goal a deadline and Notch holds back what it needs each month before it calls anything safe to spend. Contributions can route into a real savings account or sit as a figure you track.

Decide

One figure for what is safe to spend today, once bills, recurring charges and dated goals are accounted for. Under it: the pace you are spending at against the month so far, a cash-flow waterfall, what changed since last month, where the money went, your debt, and a forecast. Claude can read the same ledger and write it up in plain language, when you switch it on.

Inside

What you get on the first screen.

Four of the surfaces Notch keeps up to date, with figures from a sample month.

This month
In$4,280.00
Out$2,914.36
Saved$1,300.00
Kept$65.64
Aurora Visa$740.66 / $4,000
19% used
Home opens on what you hold, what moved this month, and how hard each card is working.
Safe to spend today

$62.40

After $1,204 of bills still to leave this month, and $310 held back for two dated goals.

58% of the month spent · 64% elapsed
Decide prices in what is already committed before it calls anything spare.
Save
Japan trip$1,050 / $4,500
23% · projected September 2027 at your pace
Emergency fund$1,200 / $10,000
12% · no deadline set
Each projection is paced from what you have actually contributed to that goal so far.
Log
B
Blue Bottle Oat flat white ×2 Aurora Chequing · Coffee & snacks
−$18.40$2,851.90
P
Pai Northern Thai Dinner with Jamie Aurora Visa · Restaurants
−$48.60−$878.75
Every row carries your own note and the running balance of the account it moved through.
The voice

The daily read, written from your own ledger.

Decide sends your figures and the notes you wrote to Claude, and returns a short read on the month. It runs once a day, stays off until you turn it on, and can be turned back off at any point.

Dining ran $184 over its cap this month. Two thirds of that landed across the two weekends your mother was visiting.

An observation

The camera fund crossed halfway today. At the rate you have been contributing since April, it completes in September.

A milestone

Groceries are up $60 on last month while restaurants are down $210. On the whole you are $150 better off than you were.

What changed
Security

How the connection to your bank actually works.

The specifics, so you can judge them yourself.

Read-only access

Bank connections run through Plaid, the same infrastructure used by major financial institutions across North America. Notch requests read access to balances and transactions. Payment initiation is not part of the connection, so there is no mechanism through which Notch could move money.

Credentials

You sign in to your bank inside Plaid's own interface. Your banking username and password are handled by Plaid and are never transmitted to, or stored by, Notch.

The daily read

Off until you enable it. Once on, a summary of your figures and the notes you wrote is sent to Anthropic's commercial API over an encrypted connection and a written read comes back. Under that API your data is not used to train models. Notch does not sell or share your data.

History

You choose how far back the first import reaches, from the whole available history down to nothing at all, and that floor is set before the first transaction is pulled. Notch reads your past for accounts, balances and recurring charges it can identify.

Leaving

Disconnect any bank at any time, and choose what happens to the data it brought: keep it, trim it to recent months, or remove it. Export the entire ledger as a file whenever you want. Deleting your account disconnects every bank immediately and erases the data after thirty days.

Questions

Asked and answered.

What is Notch?+

A personal ledger. It holds every account, balance and card you have in one place, records what each purchase was for in your own words, tracks recurring charges and savings goals, and gives you a daily figure for what is safe to spend. It covers Canada, the United States and Mexico, in Canadian dollars, US dollars or pesos.

Why the name?+

A notch is the oldest financial record there is. Value was written down by cutting a mark into bone or wood for roughly forty-three thousand years before it was written down any other way, and the English Exchequer ran the national accounts on notched tally sticks until 1826.

Do I have to connect a bank?+

No. Accounts, balances and transactions can all be entered by hand, or imported from a CSV file your bank exports. Connecting a bank through Plaid brings transactions in automatically, and you can mix the two.

Where can I use it?+

In your browser today, on any phone or computer, at app.usenotch.co. It installs to a home screen and works offline, syncing when the connection returns. The iOS app follows on the App Store at the end of 2026, on the same account.

What does beta mean here?+

Notch is open and working, and still early. Accounts are approved in small batches, so there may be a short wait after you sign up. Expect rough edges and expect things to change. Export a full copy of your ledger whenever you want, and write to info@usenotch.co when something is wrong.

Is it free?+

The app is free to use. Bank connections and the daily read from Claude carry real per-account and per-request costs, so they will sit in a paid tier when that opens, at a price published before anyone is charged.

Is my banking data safe?+

Bank connections are read-only and run through Plaid, and your banking credentials are entered inside Plaid rather than in Notch. The daily read is off until you enable it. Your data is not sold, not shared, and not used to train models. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Which banks are supported?+

Thousands of banks and card issuers across Canada, the United States and Mexico, through Plaid. That includes the major Canadian banks and credit unions, and most US institutions.