Questions, answered

Loam is a calm net worth and expense tracker for iPhone and Android. It adds up everything you own and owe into one figure in your currency, records your spending from your bank’s text messages, and shows how many months you could live on your savings and where your wealth is heading over 5, 10 or 20 years.

The first 30 days are free and need no payment details. After that Loam costs $30 a year or $3 a month, billed by the App Store or Google Play. There are no ads and no paid tiers on top.

No. Loam never asks for a bank login and does not use bank aggregators like Plaid. You tell it what you hold once, and your bank’s transaction texts keep your spending up to date from there.

Most banks send a text message for every card charge. On Android, Loam reads those messages on the phone and files each charge to the right account and category. On iPhone, apps cannot read messages, so you set up a Shortcuts automation once: when a message arrives from your bank, it runs “Record bank message in Loam”. Merchant rules file the same shop in the same category every time, and once you have filed a shop by hand twice, Loam suggests one. You can always add an expense by hand too.

Loam works with banks that send transaction texts in English or Arabic, in any country. It already knows many message formats, and when it meets a new one it learns the pattern and keeps it on the phone. Balances can be in any of 80 currencies, converted to yours. The app is in English and Arabic.

On your phone, and nowhere else. Loam has no account to sign up for and no server holding your records. There is no analytics, advertising or tracking. The privacy policy sets out the details.

No. Your balances, transactions, holdings and budgets are never sent to an AI provider, or anywhere else. There is no AI chat reading your spending, and nothing of yours trains a model. Bank texts are read on the phone, by patterns stored on the phone. The one exception is a bank message in a format Loam has never seen: that single message and its sender go to Loam’s pattern service, which writes a pattern for it and keeps nothing. From then on, every message of that shape is read on your phone. Some AI expense trackers do the opposite and send every bank text, and your spending, to AI providers and their own servers.

To value what you hold, Loam looks up public figures: exchange rates, prices, inflation, interest rates and money supply. During setup it looks up which country the phone is in, to suggest a currency. These requests carry only currency codes, tickers, dates and country codes, never your balances or transactions, though like any website these services see the phone’s IP address. When no known pattern fits a bank message, that one message and its sender are sent to Loam’s pattern service, which writes a pattern for it and keeps nothing.

Cash, bank and savings accounts, debit and credit cards, fixed deposits and CDs, fixed income funds, stocks and ETFs, crypto, gold and silver, property, mortgages, loans and installment plans. Prices refresh when you open the app, at most twice a day, and Loam says how old they are.

Pick 5, 10 or 20 years. Loam projects your deposits and investments from what you hold and the return you expect from each, which you set yourself, and any investment can be left out. You can read it in today’s buying power: Loam fills in your currency’s inflation and money-supply figures, and can take its devaluation off anything held in it. It is arithmetic on assumptions, not a prediction.

Yes. Turn on “Compare against another currency” and Loam reads your totals in a steadier currency, such as US dollars, next to your own. When your currency loses value, that second figure shows whether you are really getting ahead.

Yes. A deposit can pay its interest into the account you choose, filed on the day each payout falls due. A floating rate can follow your currency’s central bank rate plus a margin. Past its end date, closing the deposit brings the principal home and files anything above it as interest. Fixed income funds have their own section.

Yes. A credit card keeps real statements, so what is unpaid from the last statement is kept apart from what you spent this month. A purchase turned into an installment plan carries its fee, down payment and rate, and each installment counts against the purchase’s category.

Runway is how many months of your monthly budget, or an amount you set, you could cover by selling the assets you choose: cash only, or everything including stocks and property. It is the number that answers “how long could I stop working?”.

No. Loam never notifies you. Prices refresh when you open it, and it says how old they are. There are no alarm colors, no intraday charts and no watchlists: it is built to reduce money anxiety, not feed it.

Not today. Loam lives on one phone, which is what keeps your data off any server. iCloud Backup on iPhone and Google backup on Android copy Loam with the rest of the device, so restoring that backup on a new phone brings it back. Export also writes your data to a CSV or JSON file for you to keep.

Yes. Face ID, Touch ID or your fingerprint can lock the app, and the screen is covered when you switch away. The check is made by the phone itself; Loam only learns whether it passed.

Yes, as a closed beta while the iPhone version is on TestFlight. Request an Android invite with your Google account and Google Play sends it to you.

No. Loam shows what you told it, valued with public figures, and projects it with assumptions you can see and change. Decisions you make with it are yours.