The things people ask first.

Nothing. There is no paid tier, no trial, no licence key and no upsell. There is also no service to run, which is why there is nothing to bill for.

No. There is no sign-up, no login to a server, and no password to reset, because there is no server holding anything. You install the application and it works.

Yes, completely. Every core feature — import, categorisation, budgets, forecasting, reports, search — runs with no network at all. Only the optional connectors reach outside your machine.

macOS, Windows and Linux as a desktop application. The interface is also installable on a phone as a progressive web app, and full mobile clients are in development for v2.0.

No. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting and no hosted copy of your ledger. The database is a SQLite file in your own application-support directory.

Not by default. You export a statement from your bank and drop the file in. There is an optional open-banking connector, off by default, which needs your own aggregator API key — but file import is the primary path, deliberately.

Never. beatrax does no screen-scraping and never logs in as you. It reads files your bank already gives you.

CAMT.053, MT940 and CSV from banks, PDF statements from ICS credit cards, PayPal transaction exports, and email receipts from Gmail or Microsoft if you connect a mailbox.

If your bank exports CAMT.053 or MT940 — which most European banks do — then yes. A handful of banks additionally have their CSV shape recognised automatically. The banks and formats page lists what is verified and what is expected to work.

Nothing. Every row is fingerprinted, so re-importing a statement you have already imported changes nothing and creates no duplicates.

Yes, from YNAB, nYNAB and Actual Budget. Categories, budget history, transactions, splits and cleared status come across, and anything that cannot be mapped is reported rather than dropped silently.

Your devices talk directly to each other. Each holds a full encrypted copy and they reconcile through a signed log of changes. When both are on the same network they sync directly; when one is asleep, changes wait in a relay that only ever holds encrypted data it cannot read.

No. Sync is end-to-end encrypted between devices you have paired and verified yourself. The relay holds ciphertext with no key, and there is no beatrax account or server that ever sees your ledger.

Two devices belonging to the same person sync today. A genuine shared-household surface, with separate users and permissions, is a deliberate future milestone rather than something that ships now.

Remove it from your device list. That rotates the shared key and re-wraps it to the devices you kept, so the removed one cannot read anything sent afterwards.

The data is gone, and nobody can recover it — which is the same property that means nobody can hand it to anyone else. beatrax can produce an encrypted backup and reminds you to; where you keep it is your decision.

The source is public, buildable and modifiable. The licence adds ethical-use clauses, which is the one thing that prevents it being certified by the Open Source Initiative. Both of those are true and the licence page explains the trade rather than picking the flattering half.

Yes, subject to the licence's ethical-use clauses. Be aware it is a personal ledger rather than bookkeeping software — no double-entry accounting, no VAT return, no invoicing.

The build on your disk keeps working, the data is a plain SQLite file you can read with any tool, and the source is public and forkable. There is no server to switch off and no subscription to cancel.

It is built by NightWorks.io, and it is a small project rather than a funded company. That is the honest trade against the paid alternatives: no subscription, and also no support desk.