Chillar's as a Walnut alternative for Indian users

Two different bets on how tracking should work

Walnut bet that you should not have to log anything. It read transaction SMS from your bank and built the ledger for you. Chillar's bets that you trust a ledger you built yourself, so it makes the entry step short instead of removing it.

Both bets are defensible. Here is what each one costs you.

The honest comparison

The trade: SMS parsing

Automatic SMS tracking is convenient, and it is the largest thing Chillar's does not do.

It also fails in ways worth knowing about. SMS parsing depends on bank message formats, which change without notice. It misses cash. It categorises by merchant string, which is right often and wrong sometimes. And it needs read access to every message on your phone, including the ones that have nothing to do with money.

Chillar's gives you a fast manual path instead. Quick-add takes one line, 450 groceries @hdfc #food, and for the volume UPI produces you want a threshold plus a daily sweep, which the UPI tracking guide covers. That costs you more than SMS parsing does. It also costs under a minute a day, and it captures cash.

What Chillar's adds for Indian users

Rupee formatting throughout. With the locale set to en-IN, amounts group in lakh and crore with the rupee symbol, as in ₹12,34,567.89, in the ledger, in charts, and in CSV, XLSX and PDF exports. The formatting comes from the locale rather than a hard-coded template, so every surface agrees.

Loans between people, with interest kept separate. Money lent to a cousin and money borrowed from a friend both get a running balance, part-payments, and interest records that move real money without reducing the principal. This is the most common form of lending in India and the one most apps model worst.

Multi-currency for people paid from abroad. Freelance income in USD alongside expenses in INR is a normal shape here. Each account holds its own currency, and you can override the rate to the one your remittance service gave you rather than the mid-market rate.

Your data leaves when you do. A single JSON export contains everything and imports back. No tier unlocks it.

What Chillar's does not do

No SMS parsing. No bank or UPI integration of any kind. No credit products, lending offers or insurance cross-sell, which also means no revenue, so you get community support rather than a support contract.

It is a web app rather than a native Android app. It installs to a home screen and keeps working through a dropped connection, and it will not appear in your app drawer via the Play Store.

Who should switch

If you want a ledger you own, exportable at any time, with correct rupee formatting and real loan tracking, and you will spend a minute a day entering data, this fits.

If an app doing it from SMS was the only reason you tracked anything, ask yourself whether manual entry survives week three. For a lot of people it does not, and abandoning a tracker leaves you worse off than tolerating one.